The worst mentor is someone who mentors others without being asked for it. The worst of the worst is someone who does that and thinks about himself as a mentor.
The best mentor is someone who doesn't know he is one. A person who is doing their own thing and is always there to help. When someone comes to them with a problem. This person solves the problem. Without playing a teacher or something what imposes teacher-pupil labels.
As a beginner I've meet the first type of mentor. Something that could be a 20 minutes long conversation, became 1,5h "I will give you riddles instead of telling you the answer and how I did it" play.
I have never wanted anything from this guy. I meet him again years later. Turns out there was nothing to learn from him in the first place.
I,ve meet people who were the second type of mentor. They would always help me. No playing, no teacher-pupil vibe. Always I would keep in touch eith them, I would work with them. I've learned from them a lot. They had the biggest influence on my skills.
I had to handle interns/juniors myself. I would give them straight answers. I would prepare some tools or docs for them. I would only check with them if everything works. I would encourage them to break things, take their time with work, ask me if anything, and I would just leave them alone.
That worked great for some, and we had a great time working together.
For some it didn't work at all, but they didn't want to work in the first place or ask me for help when they had problems. I would still give them the answer if they asked, tell them to ask me with anything, and leave. They were not worth my time, and I wasn't the owner of the company - not my circus, not my monkeys.
in marketing companies "projects" were lead by people after sociology, they were called account managers - why??
now i have a product owner who's above me and has no technical background, never used a cms, after 8 months i understood finally that the dashboard iam discussing is a poor man's google analytics page, we are making it because for the last 2 years people were taking stuff from the database and presented web stats by hand - each day i get to uncover more and more and more stuff like that .
those nontechnical people think that they are doing rocket science stuff. like genuinely.
you can find what you need on the Internet, there is a lot of blogs where people describe what have they done.
You can be biased after working in FAANG companies. They have a stream of people that want to work there, they have money to hire a lot of them. They have no incentive to increase productivity or change suboptimal processes. You will learn that their work style is the best work style. That will be not true.
This profession is not for poor people anymore. it's a gig economy. everything can change. in last 15 years stuff got easier, but somehow getting into IT companies is harder. there is a lot of added complexity where things should be easier (js webframeworks are the same shit as php webframeworks, nothing changed, js programmers think they are awesome but they repeat the same shit). this thing will blow up. there is no worker shortage. there is a shortage of workers who can accept bullshit. you will be treated like garbage, you will be exploited, you will be forced to work long hours and you will benefit nothing from it (you will spend more money on making yourself happy). you like CS? cool. get a normal job, save money, find yourself a wife, have a home, do projects on the side - some of them might click
