The Mindset

Every now and then, when I browse through popular software development forums, I come across the question: what is the best way to teach (or to learn) how to be a professional software developer. There are infinite books and courses out there in different levels, scopes and domains. Can they make a real and significant change to the way people work, think and define their job? Can they turn anyone into a professional?

Any ad-hoc and unidirectional medium such as books and courses is bound to have only limited results in the common case. The reason is that in most cases, the domain you are trying to teach (or learn) is too complex, too abstract, and too context-sensitive to learn in a classroom or using a book. Reality is more complex than any simplified textbook example. Real-world problems seldom have cut and clear solutions. The dilemmas, tradeoffs, and compromises a professional developer has to face and make are hard to cover using these platforms.

The best way to teach people how to become professional developers is using ongoing mentoring. Mentoring is a continuous platform for working with developers on real-world issues they face during their day-to-day work. Mentoring helps the developer build up her experience in a guided manner. The mentor helps the developer come to the right solution under the actual constraints of the problem she faces. This solution becomes immediately part of the developer’s experience, because she implements it in a real project, and sees its impact on the quality of her work. Compare that to courses and books, which do not contribute to the developer’s experience, since they can rarely be applied immediately in a real context.

The best thing about mentoring is that it can create a change in the mindset of developers. It will not take long until the developer will come up with new insights, ideas and practices, which she did not explicitly learn from her mentor. These new insights are the result of adopting new thinking patterns and capturing the spirit of the taught domain.

Whenever I see a developer come up with a new idea to improve the quality of her work without reading it anywhere or hearing it from anyone, I know that this developer is on the right track. Such a developer is already building up her experience on her own, and she has the means to advance on the right direction.