To indulge in a bit of naked self-interest here: a few people have mentioned paying for coaching or mentoring. How does that work, did you personally pay or did your company pay, and what was the hourly rate if I can ask? I'm wondering if it is a reasonable angle for some of us old-timers to get into. I'd have to charge an amount comparable to software consulting, and I'd expect most people to not be willing to pay that out of pocket, but maybe I misunderestimate (sic) this crowd.
Weirdly, in one job interview they asked if I was willing to mentor junior devs. I said yes, they hired me, but the subject never came up after that. In another, the topic never came up at all, nobody approached me for mentoring at the job, but my management later hassled me about missing their expectations about it.
I'm not sure that the article's distinction between "mentoring" and "coaching" matches my experience, or how I'd use the words. When I think of who has mentored me the most, it's usually the lead engineers on the teams I've worked on. In a sense they're just doing the job they're paid for, but I still consider them mentors.
To me, asking a prospective senior engineer if they're willing to mentor juniors is equivalent to asking "are you willing to put in time and effort to help juniors learn how to be better engineers?"
Yeah, I saw the terms mentor and coach being used in different and confusing ways in this thread. I figured they don't have clear meanings and that is fine. We can approximate well enough.
I imagined in-office mentoring as being something like meeting with the person for an hour or two a week, looking at the current state of their project and making comments, doing some pair programming, that sort of thing. I've received lots of informal mentoring myself in that way, so I was looking forward to doing it. But it never came up.
Weirdly, in one job interview they asked if I was willing to mentor junior devs. I said yes, they hired me, but the subject never came up after that. In another, the topic never came up at all, nobody approached me for mentoring at the job, but my management later hassled me about missing their expectations about it.
The article is generally pretty good.