Technical mentor

Summary

The technical mentor isn’t so much a role, but skills that are used in all the other roles. Mentoring is just so important that we give it a top-level entry. A top-level entry also ensures that people can get credit for mentoring and reserve time for it.

As of 2026, we think we do this fairly well. Garage provides informal time for internal mentoring, and external mentoring. We expect to hire people who are willing to speak up and ask for help (to pull in internal mentoring when they need it), but we need to be aware if this assumption ever breaks.

Main challenges/pitfalls

  • Mentoring is hard and a different job from doing things yourself.

  • Computing is our life, but only a side-project for many of our customers. We are happy to spend time experimenting and learning by doing, other customers may want a more direct solution. Customers are very good at other things.

Expectations / checklists

  • Check Garage support for some relevant things.

  • Treat all customers with the highest level of respect, regardless of their background or current experience level.

  • Before diving into a session, make sure you explicitly discuss what the mentee wants and how they expect to get there.

  • When done, ask if you have been helpful and have done what they needed.

  • As a doctor, you learn to never ask patients ‘did you understand me?’ Instead, you always ask ‘did I explain it clearly enough?’” That way, the burden of understanding is on you, not the patient. The same philosophy is useful for technical mentoring.

  • If users apologize for not knowing things, reject it - say “it’s OK, no one is born knowing this, everyone asks similar questions, etc. Learning is a long process, you’ve focused on other things. We are here to help.”

  • Plenty has been written about mentoring… I’m not going to write much more here right now.

  • If a customer or mentee is ever frustrating you and you realize you are reaching your limits, recognize this. Ask for help or even hand it off.

  • If you realize that someone is completely in over their head and needs more fundamental help, also realize this and let your team leader know.

Internal mentoring:

  • Be aware of who is new on the team. Talk to them. Invite them to see what you do, when you do new things. Tell them enough so that they’ll keep talking to you later.

  • Give extra time to answer new people’s questions, go and screenshare and so on.

  • As the team gets larger, don’t assume people will speak up as often as you did when the team was smaller.

External materials

Training program: materials and exercises

  • See Garage support - some of the materials and exercises there are relevant here and can sometime be split up.