HELP! How Should Developer Interns Leverage Their Mentors?

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all right folks it's the weekend for me so not much commuting um but I figured I'd get two comments and then I'll have this out early in the week so hopefully you get to see this on your commute on Monday um so this comes from a viewer on YouTube here so they say I just landed my first software engineering internship awesome congratulations it's great so I'll be starting this summer the company will be interning at will be a large established company they said that I'll be moving at a fast pace environment my question to you is if uh I'm unsure about a concept or run into a bug how can I go about asking for help so first of all good to call that out because this is something you're going to want to get comfortable with um and who should I ask okay for

context we will be uh both learning and working during this internship with a group of other interns the other question if you don't mind they said that we are going to get assigned a mentor to help us if you were in my shoes and landed your first internship what would you ask them it could be anything great okay so I think this is awesome wanted to say thanks for the viewer for submitting this uh if you have questions that you want answered please leave them in the comments below look for Dev leader on social media uh that's my main YouTube channel as well or look for Nick centino on LinkedIn send me a message it should be an open profile um but yeah I think this is good I think um I've kind of touched on a some of these topics before across other videos

and I'm I think that this is the kind of thing that a lot of people um either should be thinking about when they're going through this kind of stuff or or they are already thinking about they're not really sure what to do so um I like I said I've made other videos on this but I think it's worth repeating I think you know when I'm kind of coaching more Junior people this is the kind exact kind of stuff that I end up talking to them about um so I think it's good so again congrats on the internship I think that's awesome um my question uh so if you're unsure about a concept or run into a bug how do you ask for help well in this case this person called out that they do get paired up with a mentor um I don't know how

it was conveyed to them like they were told they get assigned a mentor generally how I've seen this work throughout my entire career uh and for the record Like For What It's Worth um it's been like 12 plus years of Engineering Management and um I've had interns almost the entire time that I've been a manager like back before Microsoft I used to have interns literally every semester um I mean there were a couple of gaps but I mean like not just summer interns like it would be summer interns fall interns spring interns um so interns around the clock so uh spent a lot of time working with interns and um usually how I see this done when they say you're set up with a mentor you the other framing that you might hear if you're not this individual is like get it set up with

a buddy like a and if if you're new to a company sometimes you'll hear like an onboarding buddy just different terms but it's uh generally from what I've seen not like a mentor in the sense of like I don't know I I I see this more as like someone that's like basically there to um not directly manage you but it's uh the reason we usually set this up this kind of way is that it gives some really good um Hands-On uh it's not quite formal leadership but Hands-On informal leadership and a little bit of like informal management for for other Engineers to be able to help grow them as well so um helps you as the intern or if you're a new hire generally this is the case too uh and in my opinion having a successful internship like really uh is is more likely

if you have a like a buddy or a mentor um so it's really good for the intern and then of course like it's a it's growth opportunities for the engineer that gets to participate so when I used to manage like smaller teams and stuff um you know there were there were times where you know I'd be directly the intern manager and that's fine uh like intern manager sorry and the the mentor um on boarding buddy whatever and that's totally cool if I have capacity for it but uh I do like to make sure that I can give that opportunity to other people to help them grow so um to answer the first part of the question who should you be asking that person uh I think that's probably the best bet now I know this person here is saying like who should I ask the

priority I would say is if you're like if you're ever unsure that's the entire reason that you have the mentor or the the intern buddy kind of system is to make sure that you have a contact where if you're like I just don't know what to do that person they're literally and I I shouldn't say this because I've never talked to your intern uh Mentor or intern buddy um in in all of my experience they are they're basically told directly like your job is to make sure that you're there to go help the intern answer their questions and guide them okay so they're put into that position expecting that you're going to be doing this so I want to say that out loud like I said I don't have a guarantee in your exact situation but I I would have a hard time believing that's

not the case um and that's why I want to emphasize that because it's it's you know trying to set you up for Success that you have a contact um because even with that being the case I have still seen whether it's new hires or interns um and not like it's a problem but like they'll ping me and they'll say or like I have to have a conversation with them and they're like oh I didn't know who to ask and I'm like we set you up with a buddy though like why why aren't you um so I want to just make that very clear that's you know the best person to go to if for some reason your buddies out not available whatever uh manager is a great person to go to so it's not like I've been contacted by interns uh and or new hires

or something and and I'm sitting there going oh like you have to go talk to your buddy like that's the that's the natural order of things not like that um you know it's just like if I'm caught in meetings or something like I don't want you to go a good chunk of the day and you can't get a hold of me or something so if I'm available I will happily reply um but you know that's the kind of thing is like being being able to set someone up for success with their their buddy now the other thing that I would mention too uh because I want to kind of pull this question apart is because they were asking who um it's not just the buddy because what will happen is that and something you can try to do is as you're getting ramped up on

the team and learning about how things are going try to understand like who has um subject matter expertise in different areas because what you can start to do is figure out who else to go ask questions to and and I have personally in my entire career I have never worked at a place where people aren't happy to help there's a difference between like people being I don't know spread too thin and they don't have capacity to like answer questions because they have a tight deadline or something else going on at side of work there's a difference between that and people being like I don't like helping people I have never seen a situation where people don't like helping people I'm not saying it doesn't exist but I've never seen it so I'm saying that again out loud to try and remind you that people almost

always want to be helping you it's just that they might have something that they're you know heads down on at the time or they're in a meeting or they're but whatever they're catching up on something but um if you start to understand the subject matter expertise on the team and who else you can go to that can be great because as you get more familiar with the code the project the domain and then you understand the subject matter experts on the team you may not have to go to your buddy all the time which is great like this is what we do in software engineering like I don't have a buddy as a manager my my manager is my buddy I guess and it means I have to be resourceful understand where people's expertise is if I don't know like I I reach out to

our team chat and I say hey or you know on an email or something like hey who knows uh which partner team has responsibility over this or do we have a contact and kind of crowdsource the information but it's a really good thing to be able to build up because as you're doing that it will help you be more effective in terms of getting stuff answered so I would kind of lean into that it's not easy necessarily if the company's small or the the group that you're working with is small it can be easier I know this person said they're at a larger company but maybe still the area they're working in is small enough where you can actually get to understand where people's expertise is you could also uh you know as part of getting started there maybe you want to set up some

time with some of the people on the the team just to do introduction meetings could be a 15minute call a 30 minute call could be a sync over chat just to be able to say hey like I'm so and so this is the kind of stuff I'm into like I'm excited to be here going to be working on this project what is it that you do on the team like where you know where do you like to work like that kind of stuff I have to sneeze by the way well I wanted to make sure I caught it um and not try to sneeze into the microphone I Don't Ed these videos so it's too bad um but that's a that's a skill to practice and I think it's good and I think it's good to be aware of it so priority if you don't

know anything at all intern buddy or Mentor um back up after that if they're not available manager is a great person to go to and then over time try and build up an understanding of uh expertise on the team you may even have the recommendation from your intern buddy or mentor to say like if there's a group chat like hey just go to the chat ask provide some context and I'm going to talk about asking questions in just a moment because as we transition to the other part of this question unsure about a concept right so we have a couple things going on found a bug unsure of a concept and the other one I want to bring up is um or two I guess is like asking for clarity which might be the concept part depending uh and then getting stuck so if you

find a bug this might be something that you can even bring up in the team chat and say Hey by the way like is this expected behavior is this a known bug uh and then asking the team what the process is because maybe depending on what it is like it needs visibility or maybe you're like hey like I happen to I don't know exactly what this person is going to be doing but I happen to be using the input field and I held down a key for 10 minutes straight and I was able to you know make the UI show an error when I tried to send a field that was 10 million characters they might say okay like add it to the backlog um but maybe something else is happening and uh it's needs to be treated with priority so maybe bring that to

the team chat or something um uh unsure of a concept this might be something where you can ask your mentor to say like hey uh I wanted to know more about this I want to understand it better either they could or they might be able to tell you someone on the team that's a subject matter expert like hey maybe go message this person ask him about it see if he can set up some time where they can point you to like a Wiki page or some other information maybe there's recorded Tech talks that are done internally could be a million things but they might direct you to someone else on the team and say hey like so and so on the team they'd be great to talk to about this they can really help um the other things I wanted to to mention and I

have other videos on this so as I'm saying this if you're like I want to know more about that I don't know what I titled the videos on my channel there's already a lot um but uh it's about how you ask questions so if you look for um videos regarding like I don't know like getting started as a as a junior or like how to ask questions and stuff on this channel or even on dev leader my main Channel you might find more stuff to dive into so just a note if you want to dig deeper on it but uh I would say the two major types of questions that I try to encourage people to navigate are one if you're blocked because you need Clarity like don't wait on that ask that right away because the side effect is that you're guessing at what

you need to be doing and that could be a huge time sync you go down a particular path and someone's like that was not the right path and you wasted however much time or you get lucky and you get the right kind of focus but I would say if you need Clarity you're not under you're not sure what was asked of you get that out of the way ask the mentor ask the person that assigned you the work whatever it happens to be try to get clarity on what's being asked of you sooner rather than later there's um in my opinion that kind of stuff there's not a whole lot to um to spend time on like learning because the other part that I'm going to get into is like when you're stuck there's some element of getting stuck and getting unstuck when you're trying

to figure things out that's a really good learning opportunity I don't want you to completely eliminate that but when you're like I don't actually know what you asked me to do or I don't understand what you know you said go do this ticket and I can't understand there's no detail in it or something what am I supposed to do that's the kind of thing where I'm like you could sit there trying to figure things out but like I don't know if that's a good use of your time I would rather just get you to clear that up now if you're stuck so you've been trying to work through something you understand what the goal is right you have Clarity on that but you get stuck so either um you tried something and it didn't work or you're not sure what to try this exercise that

I tried to get people to do I've used it for coaching other people as well is uh and one of the videos I put up uh has a good story about an actually from an intern uh that we literally taught uh this mechanism and it in my opinion it works very well but um The Cue that I want you to think about is assume that when you go to ask for help when you're stuck assume that someone will say to you what have you tried so far and if you're default if you're like I haven't tried anything that's a good reminder that you should go try something so if you have Clarity on what's being asked of you right so that's the other path if you don't have Clarity ask that right away get that figured out but you have Clarity at this point and

now you're stuck what have you tried so far because if your answer is I haven't tried anything what I what I don't want like a mentor to do what I don't want a more senior engineer to do or anyone on the team to do is just to give you answers straight up because the problem with that is it doesn't teach you anything if you're stuck and you haven't tried anything what's going to happen the next time you're going to get stuck you're going to have learned that you just ask and someone else will do it for you and essentially it's not that you never get better but like it's kind of a slow process to get better because other people are doing the thinking for you so I I highly recommend and you can time like in the other videos I talk about time boxing

this kind of stuff I just don't want to keep repeating it um but the idea is like don't spend forever on it figure out what the right balances again dive into that in the other videos but try something what is ideal is if you're able to go ask for help and you say say it's to your Mentor you're like hey I feel like I'm stuck on this now and they go great okay like what's what's the issue and you're like well um you told me that I needed to do this thing with the database and I'm trying to and uh I seem to be kind of stuck at which which way to go forward now then they say to you okay well what have you tried so far ah right and then now at this point you say okay great um so what I was

thinking was I looked at this part of the code and I saw this pattern that's being used but I also saw this other pattern in the code that's being used so uh I think that I can actually Implement either of them you know in terms of the the data that I need or the variables and how to set that all up I'm like each path each option there I can do either and um I was trying to look around a little bit more and um I see both of these patterns used and I actually can't tell the difference between them it doesn't seem to have a common pattern so just you know even with this super contrived example I'm literally just making up off the top of my head someone would say okay at least this person went and looked at least they started comparing

and contrasting things now they don't understand that like there's multiple patterns in the code base okay now they can say oh I'm just again making this up actually this other pattern that's sort of the Legacy one we're trying to move away from we haven't gone through and removed all that code so you should use this other one here's why and if they don't tell you why please ask why it's a great opportunity and they might even say hey if you're nearby that other code you could also try to change that other pattern to be the new one and you could help the next person to come through but the point is that you did something you at least put in some effort to go look and understand um there might be other cases where you're like I don't know how to go fix this bug

and then someone says what have you tried so far have you tried debugging it yet have you tried looking through logs maybe you're dealing with uh distributed systems and you're like I I'm getting stuck pulling the logs and I've tried running the different commands that were listed in the wiki Pages like try something because that's the expectation is you should be trying something okay so if you try and you get stuck that's okay but try doing something okay and then over time this gets better I promise but that's my recommendation so that you're actually putting in some effort you're learning and the other reminder that I want to give you here is like switch positions on this okay so imagine that you are someone who's trying to get their work done and someone comes to you and say says I'm stuck and you say well

what have you tried so far and they say nothing and you go okay um and you know in your head like have some ideas for how to approach it and then you tell them and then they come to you again in the future and you say what have you tried so far and they say nothing over time you might start to be like hey man like what's going on here why am I always the one that's doing this it's it's going to start to feel like you're doing someone else's job so my reminder for you is that most people if you can demonstrate that you've tried something you at least did a little bit of exploring you tried to read through get the help you need you're trying to be resourceful it's really difficult to look at someone and be like oh man like you're

just trying to you know use me for getting your job done no people really appreciate when you do that kind of stuff so um hopefully that helps kind of make you feel more comfortable asking for help just try try doing something first hope that helps um now I wanted to talk uh on the next part here about um you have this mentor and they're saying if you were my shoes and landed your first internship what would you ask them I think it's a good question um I think some scenarios where I've seen this be kind of weird or maybe not work so well um is when people are completely distracted from their work so if you're an intern you're distracted from your work and instead of focusing on like getting help and asking questions about work and focusing on the work part I've seen where

interns are very much like hey like I'm act like just going to give you an example like hey I'm actually like really interested in like making video games like have you made video games I want to talk to you about making video games and like I have made video games and I think it's really fun but if someone's totally distracted at work or they're not getting through their work I'm like I don't want to talk to you about making video games I want to talk to you about getting your work done so I would say like try to focus on at least initially if you're getting some momentum things are going well um or you're trying to get that way I mean try to focus on what's going on at work that's my recommendation is like kind of set that precedent that like I'm here

to to do a good job I always tell people for internships my goal is that you're going to learn that's my goal so ultimately if you want to talk to me about like building video games and like what that looks like I'm not gonna I'm not going to tell you no because I want you to learn I want you to enjoy it I want you to learn but I would very much appreciate if you were operating it like you know being productive and then we can like the it kind of feels like an extra thing to me so that's how I look at it but at the end of the day I just want people to learn when they're coming for an internship I want them to enjoy it I want them to learn because if they're learning and they're enjoying it if we can

give you a little bit of direction I feel that like long term like that's the kind of thing that I look for in software Engineers you're eager to learn you are trying to do good work it's uh you know those two things go a long way um okay so let's make the assumption that you're you're doing good work okay you're trying to learn about the domain that you're in because you're trying to do your job well and that's great now you're like okay I have access to this person that's in the industry and I like what should I be asking them there's a lot of direct to go um something that could be super interesting for you is like maybe ask them about their career Journey depends on like what level your mentors at maybe they're maybe they're pretty Junior but they're still mentoring you

cool okay like how did you get that opportunity to be mentoring someone if uh you know you're still pretty Junior what did your journey look like to get here trying to learn about like the uniqueness of other people's like experiences and Journeys I think is a really awesome opportunity um because you start to uncover things that like they look different than how you got to where you are um on my main YouTube channel Dev leader I have a a podcast playlist where I interview other software engineers and like I love it because it's so cool to hear about you know people that are having success in their careers and like completely different than how I how I went through my care or how I've been going through my career so for me that's like it opens up my my mind to many different perspectives and

love that so that's like one thing that I might recommend um I think if there's something like if you're spending time uh with your mentor and you're you're sort of admiring how they're able to do certain things like that's a great opportunity to ask like hey seems like you're really able to debug these things super quick like you know could we talk about that like how did you build up that skill or it seems like you're really good with working with databases like you know anytime that I'm working with you and we come across a problem you know it like that how like how was that the case like what did that look like for you to get there um I think that's something interesting asking for feedback in general uh is critical so I would not miss they're likely providing it to you they

should be if they're your Mentor especially for an internship but if they're not ask I think absolutely at a minimum like that's one thing you want to extract from your mentors like how am I doing here try to be specific too if you say am I doing well they'll say yes or if you're if you're not doing well they might say no um but you end up getting very generic responses to generic questions this just kind of how it works but if you're like hey I was working on this project and I wanted to know specifically in terms of like my my rate of delivery like did that feel like it was good or did you feel that my my poll requests that I put up on this part of the feature like that was that how did you feel about that did I have

good test coverage on that or did I design that well specific questions more specific feedback uh would try to make sure you're focused on that otherwise what could be really cool and fun is like maybe asking them about where they're headed in their career like hey like I know that you're at this level and that's cool and like I got to talk to you about how you got here like you know where like I'm curious and this is the reason I'm saying this is like not specifically for you to go ask this it's just like this is an example of me thinking of something that I would be curious about I think being genuinely curious if you have questions like that that would be cool to to answer or to ask sorry have answered for you I'll give you another brief example when I've been

done when I've done can't speak when I've done early in career mentorship I've had mentees ask me um I had someone say like hey like I heard that you do content creation like what does that look like why do you do that like tell me about that and I was like oh like what you know what specifically you want to know about and they're like I I'm just like I just want to hear about it it sounds really cool and it I don't like to this day I don't know if it's because they wanted to get started but they said to me like I just want to hear like what you're doing why you're doing it like what motivates you to do it they're like it just sounds really interesting and like you know I'm not their manager I'm not they're not getting like brownie

points from me to like ask me about stuff that I like to do so they were like it was cool because they were genuinely curious and I think that goes a long way too so going back to the other comment I made about like asking about like hey like how do you make video games cuz I want to do that there's nothing wrong with asking that kind of stuff if the person's genuinely curious like that for me when people are curious they're trying to learn they're excited to learn I want to take advantage of that opportunity when people are excited about something because I'm like if I tell you my perspective if I tell you information my like different experience I've had when people are excited it's like they want to act like a sponge I don't know if it necessarily Works more effectively but

to me it seems like it does so I'd like to be able to to leverage that so yeah I think that might be what I ask if especially if uh like I was saying if you're kind of admiring how the person's progress in their career um try to try to understand what that's look like for them yeah I think that's what I had to say on this one so um hope that helps I hope that answers everything uh if you have questions that you want to answer to remember leave them in the comments below or look for Dev leader on social media send me a message completely Anonymous if you leave it in the comments it's not Anonymous people can go looking through obviously but if you send it to me in a message I'll just keep your name out of it so hope that

helps and I'll see you next time take care