Mentorship for Engineers

Lara Hogan, VP, Engineering, Kickstarter

Lara defines sponsorship as "being on the hook to help get someone promoted." She covers these steps to do that: • When do we raise up names? • Examples of sponsorship • Be a better mentor by listening more • Explore why this might feel icky to you

Eric Elliot, Computer Scientist, Adobe

Eric encourages organizations to invest in mentorship to improve team productivity and close the senior engineer hiring gap.

Gergely Orosz, Engineering Manager, Uber

Gergely discusses mentorship practices that work well engineer-to-engineer, guidance on being an effective mentor, and suggestions for finding mentors.

Nicholas C. Zakas, Principal Architect, Box

Nicholas shares some of his learnings on effective mentorship: allow the mentee to set the discussion agenda, mentor the whole person, provide strategies rather than giving answers, give homework, don't prevent all mistakes, and don't try to create a you-clone.

Carly Robinson, Senior Software Engineer, Slack

Carly covers: • The promise of mentorship • What Slack does right • Key best practices to optimize your junior engineers • Engineering culture