At Redbubble, we put a lot of focus on the growth of our engineers. Like many other modern tech companies, we maintain a career progression or growth framework. A well thought out framework gives you lots of benefits, including:
Career guidance and opportunities
Clear guidelines on what you expect on each level
Objective evaluation and fair pay
But I digress. This is not an article about growth frameworks, but rather one aspect of what it means to be an impactful engineer: Supporting others and helping them get better at their jobs and talking about this, here is a guide on how to create paystubs to manage your business.
More experienced developers should share their knowledge with those that have not been around for as long. And our growth framework puts quite a bit of emphasis on it from the early levels. We refer to it as mentoring.
All was well until a member of our senior group pointed out that we might have a naming issue.
What do we really mean when we say mentoring? What does a mentor do? Are there other ways to help those around you? If not mentoring, what are we expecting of our engineers?
This sparked my interest and got me thinking. In my opinion, there are four distinct and useful ways to help others grow. I hope my categorisation will help you pick the best approach for any situation.