Programming “Mentors”

There are a lot of mentors in the programming universe, and they all seem to do different things. Mentors from Codementors, for example, answer complex problems and clean up bad code at a quarterly hour rate. Eric Elliott’s DevAnywhere is a subscription based teaching platform that offers a 1:1 mentor to student ratio. Rookieup offers mentors for critiquing and improving portfolio work. Bootcamps often offer a favourable student to mentor ratio in place of teachers. Maybe it’s cultural variance, but when I think of mentors I think specifically of a lasting advisory relationship between two people that is not tied to monetary compensation.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the mentors mentioned previously, they’re all great products, they all help people, and it’s perfectly okay to make a little money while helping people. They also all fit under the scope of mentor, which itself has a pretty broad definition. It’s an old term, dating back to Ancient Greece— It’s in Homer’s Odyssey — so over history it’s gained a number of applications. I can’t quite say that the word has been co-oped beyond it’s context for the previous mentioned sites, because it has a rather wide context, but I do think consultant is a better term when you need to hire a programmer to advise on a subject, and I think coach, instructor, teacher or tutor is a better term for developers who are tied to educational programs.

What I wasn’t able to find during my search for mentors in the programming world was a global website that featured a more altruistic version of mentoring. I ended up building Be A Programmer — https://beaprogrammer.org — a platform for volunteer based mentorships. If you’re looking for a mentor, you can apply to the many mentorships on the site. If you’re looking to help people from all around the world become programmers , you can sign up with your LinkedIn account and create your own mentorships.

If you’re wondering why a site like Be A Programmer is necessary, it comes down to a void in the current market place specifically for this type of volunteer mentorship. It’s certainly not the only way to give back to the programming community, as there are local chapters for FreeCodeCamp, NodeSchool, and CodeDojo all across the world, and country and state specific community programs geared towards helping people become programmers. Be A Programmer is not a place for asking specific technical questions. It’s not a place for finding private tutors. It’s simply for those who feel like they need an experienced guide to help them through training, job hunting, career shifting, or anything else programming related, and for those experienced devs who want to help people.

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