Mentoring and Web 2.0
In my first job out of college in 1979, I had to learn to program in what was a typical IBM mainframe environment. The dumb CRT terminals we used were fairly expensive and only managers and above had one in their cubicle. The rest of us “bottom-feeders” had to share terminals that were all lined up together in a bank. I remember getting an assignment, designing a solution at my desk, and then going to the CRT to enter, compile, and test my work. In the process, another more senior co-worker would inevitably take the seat next to me to do their work. It wouldn’t take very long before he (or she) would glance at what I was doing and offer a suggestion on how I could do it better. Most of the time, the suggestion was some sort of editing trick that saved time or reduced the risk of error. Over time, I instinctively learned to ask for help anytime there seemed like there should be a better way to do something than the way I was doing it when I couldn’t figure it out on my own. In a few weeks, I felt quite competent. After a few months, I was happily helping out the latest new hire. I’ve been a huge believer in mentoring ever since.
But as my career progressed and technology advanced, I quickly lost the elbow-to-elbow, direct, sustained relationship with my mentors. The problem domain changed as well, having less to do about development environments and more to do about more abstract concepts like architecture and strategy. I still had my mentors, but they were fewer in number and less available to me. This was actually one of my strongest motivators for working at a consulting company. In consulting, the volume of potential willing and able mentors is very high. The consulting business model has the right incentives: talented people are requested and utilized and survive. They learn to sell work that needs other talented people and so they want to share their knowledge. Still, as a believer in the power of mentoring, I miss the days of being elbow to elbow with people that could teach me.
This is why the emerging work of Web 2.0 is so exhilarating to me. There is a huge opportunity to increase my number of mentors on an unimaginable scale and with a level of attention I didn’t think was possible. Brian Magierski is a great example for me. He is one of my mentors in the current realities and potential of Web 2.0 tools and techniques and his blog postings are informative and time-saving. When Brian references someone’s work, you can bet it is worth reading like his tag to Andrew McAfee who has provided a simple but eloquent framework for when and why to apply Web 2.0 technologies.
As a novice to this world, I must admit that the quantity of learning I need to go through seems sometimes overwhelming. But the power of being mentored by bright people like these two, people who don’t even know me, instills confidence and energy!