Ask HN: Stepping into a new role as a Senior, mentoring dos and dont's?

1 points by msejas 34 days ago | 1 comment

As the title says, I'm starting a new role as a Senior where part of my responsibility will be to become the defacto team lead without the HR responsibilities.

Part of the core responsibilities is mentoring juniors I would love to learn from people's experiences as much as I can about what works and what to avoid.

Any point of view is welcome, from the junior perspective or the senior perspective, even more grateful if you can give me anecdotes about other senior responsibilities (taking ownership).

I haven't been able to have or find any mentors to guide me on this process, my career has been quite bootstrapped so far, so any advice you can give is beyond welcome.

thanks a lot!

tene80i 34 days ago |

Skills frameworks are great. Your mentee can rate themselves at different levels across different competencies. You can have a discussion about where you see them differently on any areas. You can agree, based on your experience and their ambitions, on what growth areas they ought to focus on in the coming months /year etc. The structure really helps, as does putting it partly on them. People are often not bad at rating themselves if there are clear skill level descriptions.