DonTheDeveloper Podcast
DonTheDeveloper Podcast
5 Ways to Chase a Mentor Away as a Junior Developer
In this video, I’m diving into why senior developers often refuse to mentor junior developers. If you’ve been struggling to find a mentor, it might be because of some common mistakes that are easy to fix but often overlooked. I’ll share five harsh truths that explain why senior devs aren’t jumping at the chance to help you—and, spoiler alert, it’s not just about them being too busy.
This isn’t about sugarcoating; I’m here to call out some real issues that might be holding you back, like not taking the initiative, showing inconsistent effort, and having unrealistic expectations. If you’re serious about growing as a developer, this video is for you. Let’s break down what it takes to truly earn mentorship and become the kind of developer others want to help.
---------------------------------------------------
🔥 Webdev Career Help - https://calendly.com/donthedeveloper/coaching
🎮 Join Discord - https://discord.gg/TpQe2k8Ab3
❤️ Support What I Do - https://www.patreon.com/donthedeveloper
Disclaimer: Some product links are affiliate links which means if you buy something I'll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.
===========================
WEBDEV COURSES I HIGHLY RECOMMEND:
🎓 Learn Frontend - Scrimba (20% off): https://scrimba.com/the-frontend-developer-career-path-c0j?via=donthedeveloper
🎓 Learn Backend - Boot.dev (25% off): https://boot.dev/?promo=DONTHEDEVELOPER - Get 25% off your first payment with code "DONTHEDEVELOPER"
🎓 Already Experienced? Level Up Here - Code Crafters (40% off): https://app.codecrafters.io/join?via=donthedeveloper
So I know a lot of you junior developers out there would love to get mentorship from senior developers. That is something I wish I had when I was trying to become a developer. I get it, and today I'm going to tell you five reasons why a lot of senior developers aren't going to want to mentor you. And it really has to do with you just being a bad mentee and pretty much everyone starts out as a bad mentee and so I'm going to talk about things to look out, for things to overcome, so that you are really just mentorship material, to be honest. So let's jump into it. Lack of initiative and a lot of this I see in my community and questions that pop up, but also these are things that I hear from other professional developers that are trying to take their time out to help one or two people here and there. But lack of initiative is a big one, and when I say lack of initiative, I mean on your part. What are you doing to solve your issues first? What are you trying? The number of questions that pop up in discords and dev communities that I see where it's just generic, like how do I learn to code? What programming language should I learn first, just like very generic questions that give no extra context, give no hint that you've done any research whatsoever, or like really simple questions that you will get an answer to with the first Google search. And the fact that you're even asking this in a Discord instead of just typing it in Google is ridiculous. You are wasting people's time. Why aren't you taking that initiative to at least do a simple search to try to find that answer? When you ask questions that show like, hey, I've looked this up, here's where I'm getting stuck. You give more context. You show that you've done a little bit of research on your own. Now that's a question worth answering. Now you are respecting other developers' time. There are a lot of people, a lot of people, a lot of new developers that need to hear this Do research on your own. First. You will get people that want to help you when you've shown that you've tried this on your own. This is a big one. So when you show that you can take that initiative on your own initially, that's when senior developers want to give back. That's when they want to help you, because now their time is hyper-focused on. Well, it's not hyper-focused, but they're using their time wisely because now they have a certain amount of expertise that it might be hard to apply to your problem by just looking on Stack Overflow or just looking on Google. Just take that initiative, be upfront about it. You do that and a lot of good developers are going to want to help you out because you're respecting their time.
Don Hansen:So inconsistent effort and commitment is the second one. Oh boy, um, there are a lot of developers that kind of just come into this profession and they just start asking questions. They, uh, I think, have some good intention of like wanting to get involved in the dev community and build stuff and learn stuff, and they're excited, right, but it's, you know, a passing motivation. It's a passing. They got some dopamine hits and they are just riding high on YouTube videos showing the lifestyle of a developer, which is often very misleading. But they're not really committed. They might give up in a week. They might give up in a month. They might give up in six months, and if six months seems like a long time to you to try to become a developer, you are in for a world of hurt in this market.
Don Hansen:A lot of senior developers and professional developers that want to help out. They want to see that you've been at it, that you are actually committed, that you're serious. Committed that you're serious because it's really frustrating to provide, like, take your time to go through someone's situation, provide help and then they just gave up in two weeks Again. It just comes to respecting people's time. Now, you know, some people might take this personally, some might not, but what I'm saying is you're going to get more people wanting to help you out when you know you have a history of learning to code, like you are really in this. You're building projects, you're going through coursework. It's month three, it's month four, it's month seven, it's month eight, it's past a year and you just have a history to show where you aren't just taking extremely long breaks. You are trying, you are struggling and this is why you're asking for help or you just want some extra feedback, but you have a history of trying.
Don Hansen:You are serious about this. This is what companies try to weed out as well. It's like are you actually serious about this career path? Are you just coming in for the money? Right, because there's a lot of pressure, a lot of reasons to quit being a developer and there are a lot of high paid developers that are leaving the industry because they just don't want to deal with the industry anymore.
Don Hansen:Right, are you serious about learning to code? Does it excite you? Do you have any excitement to show for this? Are you just kind of dragging along and frustrated and asking questions out of frustration, like, yeah, I don't really want to do this, but I gotta learn this? Can you guys help me out? Like no, no one wants to fucking help you out when you act like that. No one wants to help you out when you are just push it, forcing yourself through this and you don't want to do it. There's nothing inspiring about that. There's nothing that makes me personally want to help you. When you don't even enjoy this, you're just going to quit anyways. Like that's the truth.
Don Hansen:And so if I give you advice, another developer gives you advice. We want to see that you you follow through with that advice and especially if we give advice, like you got to practice this like week after week after week, and we want to trust that you're going to follow through with it and do this you, you know, into month three, if you know we give you like a three month duration to actually try to accomplish this, or maybe it's like a three month project that you got to work on. We don't want you to just give up within a week and say, oh, that's that. I'm just going to look for other advice from other developers until they give me advice that's extremely simple and easy and it takes like a day to complete, to give me that little dopamine hit, when in reality, I haven't really grown that much in a single day. I just took the easiest advice possible, because that's all I'm doing is fishing for easy advice for this path for this problem, showing a history of commitment and enjoyment and learning to code like wanting to learn to code For this path for this problem, showing a history of commitment and enjoyment and learning to code like wanting to learn to code. And you were in this. You were truly in this out of enjoyment and excitement to build shit, and you're going to take the advice seriously and you're going to follow through with it. That is awesome. If someone gives you advice for that, they're probably going to want to give you advice and help you out again when they've seen that you've followed through. That follow-through is important.
Don Hansen:So a third thing is lack of respect for time. Sometimes you and I'll see this a lot in dev communities where they'll get a little bit of help, but they'll be, uh, pinging someone that answered their question. Or even if they have like a mentee mentor relationship, they're constantly pinging with non-urgent questions. Maybe you have like a an hour set up each week or an hour set up each month or something like that, and you are just sending five, six questions to this person to answer for you right away. That aren't that important, that you could probably Google, that you could probably figure out, and you just don't realize that good developers are busy. They're busy. Professional developers. They're busy with their work, right.
Don Hansen:I've seen mentees like reach out to people that have helped them in the past and they're just like constantly pinging that developer while they're at work, while they're doing shit right, and you can't just wait until your scheduled day, like that. There are mentees that do this, stop it, stop it. Understand that they can give their help to anyone and a lot of people will request help. There are a lot of people trying to become developers and if a senior developer or someone takes interest in you, don't use them up, don't use them dry. They only have so much available time. They might have other responsibilities. Chill out. If you schedule something. Wait for that and don't constantly ping that developer.
Don Hansen:But it goes back to you know, are you spending a considerable amount of time trying to figure stuff out on your own? Save that hour for the stuff that truly is blocking you, that you just can't Remember. Chad Chabiti and other AI models can help you through stuff. They can be your mentor. So if someone is taking their time out of their day to help you out, use all the tools that you have in your arsenal, and you know what a great question is when you do finally talk to a mentor, it's. I've tried all of this. This is what I think is the solution. What do you think about this? That is a great question because it shows that you've done research, that you've invested your time into trying to figure it out on your own and you respect this other developer's time. That is an awesome question, and you'll notice or I've noticed that a lot of people gain mentors based off of the high quality, respectful questions that they ask more senior developers. That's how mentorships are formed for free. Now again, if you want to provide value, you want to pay for this. That's fine. You just establish those boundaries of when you're going to communicate and everything. But that is another way, and providing value to that mentor is a great way to respect time as well. But I'm really trying to talk about when you are getting involved in dev communities and you are getting free help. You really need to respect developers' time and you're going to get that feedback. You're going to get that help without burning that developer out.
Don Hansen:Another thing, fourth thing resistance to feedback. I've seen this quite a bit. There are a lot of people that still have an ego. That ego is going to get crushed, and it should. I had an ego. I still have a little bit of an ego. Everyone has an ego, right. But one thing that you're going to realize is how little you truly know when you dive deeper and deeper into the software engineer world and when a mentee is just very resistant to feedback or taking it personally, or just doesn't act on it at all because they know better, it's like that's fine. If you disagree with your mentor, that's fine. Just give a reason why and talk that through. This is why I think it actually this is the solution, right, or I should do this. What do you think about that? And always getting that feedback. That's a humble way to disagree, but ultimately there are a lot of people that are in for a big ego check in this industry.
Don Hansen:This is a deep industry with very smart people that have humbled themselves over time because they've had good mentors, because they've worked with good teams and they've gotten amazing feedback and they've kind of had their path curated a little bit as they've gone further into their professional career to become a really good developer that's humble enough to learn, uh, what they need to, and understand that they don't know what they think they know as well as they think they do. They don't have that deep understanding in this thing and then in this thing and then in this thing, and they gotta humble themselves, be open to that feedback. Look through the documentation again. Dive back into the some fundamental concepts that are incredibly important that you're missing to get this be able to tackle this problem like it's just that are incredibly important that you're missing to get this be able to tackle this problem Like it's just humility after humility after humility, over and over and over. And I don't think a lot of you why. I think a lot of you are ready for it, but I think you need to be open to it. This is a really humbling profession and you need to be ready for that. You need to figure out ways to drop your ego. You need to figure out ways to humble yourself. You need to figure out ways to drop your ego. You need to figure out ways to humble yourself. You need to figure out ways to be open to that feedback or you are going to have a really rough time.
Don Hansen:So fifth reason unrealistic expectations. Mentorship takes time. Well, more importantly, your growth as a software engineer takes time. Don't expect to, even if you pay for mentorship. Don't expect to significantly grow in a very short duration.
Don Hansen:When this is a 10 plus year long career path, I think a lot of people think that they're supposed to just automatically get it. Even if you have a really good mentor that teaches something to you in a great way, even if a course teaches you something in a great way, like the concept, it takes multiple applications to start solidifying a deep understanding of what you've just learned. It takes project work. It takes using it, especially in a professional setting, and then getting feedback. Like it takes multiple applications to start understanding stuff, and I think some people expect to have a tremendous amount of growth with a mentor right away and you got to give yourself time.
Don Hansen:Don't expect those rapid results. And you know one thing senior developers are going to kind of be alerted to is, if you're expecting rapid results, you're probably going to get burned out. A lot of burnout from learning to code happens with people having way too high of expectations of, like, how quickly they're going to learn. A lot of burnout among junior developers happens like that. You need to slow it down. You need to give yourself time and a senior developer that sees you being patient and being okay with forgetting something and then having to reinforce that knowledge just a little bit more this time being patient with yourself, that is a good signal for a long-term career for a developer currently a junior developer.
Don Hansen:Be patient with yourself, be patient with your mentor and keep in mind you're not always going to get the ideal mentorship. You're not always going to get the ideal feedback or the advice. You just take what you can get. Say thank you. That's something that I don't see a lot of um like I'll be honest, like when people just come into my discord and they ask people questions and then nothing, they don't say thank you. I just ban them. I don't want people like that in my community.
Don Hansen:Awesome dev communities are about developers that appreciate people's time and they're grateful for that help. I think a lot of junior developers need to just humble themselves and realize if they are willing to be patient, if they are willing to be kind, if they are willing to be respectful of other people's time, if they are willing to give back and help out. Get involved in the dev community, meet people, build meaningful connections. You are going to form natural mentorships. Over time you are going to become a mentor yourself. You're also going to have a mentor. People are going to be attracted to wanting to mentor you, especially when you are giving back and you are being. You are grateful for the feedback that you're getting. You are giving back and you are being. You are grateful for the feedback that you're getting. It's all about bringing a presence that's very constructive and kind and humble into the dev community and wanting to build that dev community up, just like it is building you up. You do that and you are going to eventually gain a mentor.