Lessons learned from my mentors as a junior software engineer

A photo that I took of a Peranakan restaurant that I recently visited during my visit to Melaka.

I think that mentorships with seniors are valuable, especially for a young joiner in any new industry. It is a good way for one to form new connections and seek out advice and new knowledge. As the Chinese saying goes, 少走歪路. It helps to prevent one from walking stray paths that leads to nowhere.

In my previous company, I used to take advantage of a mentorship program to match with other senior engineers within the company, in both the Singapore and US offices. Other than the mentorship program, I also proactively reached out to find mentors for myself. How I came to find one of my mentors was by first interacting with them through my work where I had to make a code change to the Git repository that they maintained. Through the code review comments left by them and our conversations on slack where I enquired about how to code a certain feature, I found that they were very knowledgeable and technically skilled. Therefore, after knowing them for close to one year, I decided to muster my courage to pop the question, asking if they would be willing to be my mentor.

During my almost 2-year tenure with my previous company, I was almost always attached to at least two senior engineers whom I would meet up on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. The longest mentorship lasted for 1+ year and the shortest mentorship lasted for a…