Mentorship experiences

The next two posts intersect my personal and professional life – I’ll return to the testing stuff properly after these posts are published, but as I consider this relevant to all things JG-Tests, I figured it is worth telling the story.

So I recently read an article on QA Hiccups (https://qahiccupps.blogspot.com/2023/04/paving-way.html) which detailed the experiences of a mentor and a mentee over a particular period of time (approximately 2 years?) and the benefits that each person in the mentor-mentee relationship received in turn. This caused me to reflect on my own experience with this last year and whilst I am unable to get my former mentors input, I’ll just detail my experience.

Just to remove all doubt – there was a financial transaction specified so that our agreement would begin, and some prep work was required on my side before commencing the sessions.

The course syllabus was well organised, and actively maintained in the time I was doing said exercises. Principles of coding, coding exercises, general advice provided, live call consultations and a private chat channel available for ad-hoc questions.

Things started well. Regular attendance to the live calls, followed by regular feedback on coding e.g. ways to improve my solution or to progress past issues I experienced with the exercises. I preferred to use the live call to unlock myself after trying to unblock my own progress unassisted – on reflection, I could have moved a lot quicker if I had used all methods of communication available.

Within a few months, and after completing exercises that increased in difficulty, that gave me scope to think about a better solution, it was soon time to start my own self-directed project. In this case it was a VST plugin.

Now this is where things took a worse turn.

I picked too ambitious a project, knowing that I had 3 more viable ideas that should have been assessed more seriously.

Over the course of the next few months, I wrestled with this project and with little/no progress made over the course of weeks (further backed with breaks in proceedings due to holidays and other commitments) left the project in disarray. And ironically, the person who was meant to help when I didn’t know WTF I was doing, I avoided the live calls. And unfortunately when I tried to resume the project, my previous chicanery was returned in kind. On live calls in particular and then lastly, via the private chat channel. The relationship had broken down to a point where neither position was tenable anymore, so that was that.

Bad outcomes:

• Never completed the project I set out to do, and lost all coding competency for it
• Spoiled professional relationship (this was mostly my fault as I was the the avoidant party)
• Lost confidence about coding abilities

However on a more general note, there were good outcomes:

• Improved understanding of OOP principles which I was able to incorporate into my professional role and progress certain test automation initiatives
• Understanding of a new programming language
• The iterative review process enabled me to have a new found appreciation for lexical changes and clean(er) code