Mentors and long-term lessons

A few days ago I made a quick post on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab) (PT) about a book I had enjoyed lately where one of the chapters speaks about mentors and their role in one's professional development.

After a bit of thinking, I realized I never had an official one and decided to do the following exercise: reflect on some key moments previous leaders got me thinking for good and had a considerable impact on my career.

My first boss in Brazil, Pedro.

This leader took a bet on me and pushed me to think wide. I was hired to write ActionScript for his company and never did. Between my contract signing and the first day on the job, Pedro had shifted his plans toward new concepts. During four years, he always brought crazy new ideas on how to improve, think out of the box, and scale our deliveries and impact. Under his push, I had to learn many new things quite fast, mainly technical, be very multitasking, and persistent.

At the time I was still designing websites. So from writing ActionScript in the job description I went on to research design ideas, make mood boards, get to know the clients, do design concepts, wireframing, information architecture, front and backend code, implementation, maintenance, and more.

In the end, I left the company not to go somewhere else but to work on my own as a freelancer, and the next two years could not have been possible without all the learnings I'd had in my previous position with him.

Lesson for later:

Be curious about as many topics as you can around you.

My first EM, Caio.

With Caio, I got my first experience with someone asking me frequently how I was feeling, what made me happy, and what bothered me. I quickly saw the power of those 1:1s and was quite excited when their time came. Caio had the capacity of using words that would open me to let go of the frustrations and negative points. Furthermore, we would always find starters for actionable and todos over time.

Lesson for later:

Listen to others and find a way for them to open up. Invest time in your 1:1s. It has and continues to be written down in books and blogs for a reason.

Caio also insisted on teaching his engineers several aspects of our job we were not so good at or were even unaware of. We had weekly lessons and those made me discover topics like e2e testing, Typescript, Docker, and RxJS among others in record time. It was not always easy to follow but the teaching concept was imprinted.

Lesson for later:

Do you want a team that performs? Great, find the missing skills and dedicate time during working hours to work on them.

Life lesson, Geraldo.

Probably one of the most valuable lessons I was taught. After a few years in the same position without any salary increase, I started to build some anger in myself. No one's looking after me. No one is looking after my salary. This is not fair. And so on and so. So what did I do? I went looking somewhere else. At the time I had already received a few contacts for new positions but without going further. So, on one occasion, I replied.

Turned out I got an offer after the process with a massive salary update. Something you only see in movies. Great I thought, let's do this. I proceeded to the HR of my company and one day later, got a message from the boss, asking for 30mins with me. Sure enough, we started talking, I expressed my pain and told him about the offer. He replied that although the company had lacked to look actively after my salary, this situation was at least 50% my fault.

His point was that I had kept this all for myself and never expressed it to him or other senior developers that could have helped me. I never made a point of my frustration, never expressed my intention, never said "Hey, I have been doing a pretty decent job for a while, I deserve a raise". Nope.

Lesson for later:

Speak up, never keep it inside. You can always act on something, even if it does not seem easy or straightforward. Ask a peer, your direct leader, or even an external mentor.

Conclusion

The idea behind this post is to invite you to try to do the same. Find out who had an impact on your career and why. What did those leaders do that made you a better professional? Find patterns, teachings, and lessons learned. Try to see if you can apply this in your daily routine as an EM.