The Senior Engineer's Duty: Why Mentorship Matters
Culture

The Senior Engineer's Duty: Why Mentorship Matters

Mentorship is the flywheel of the tech industry. Learn how to be a great mentor and why it accelerates your own career.

Dec 09, 2025
8 min read
The Senior Engineer's Duty: Why Mentorship Matters

There is a misconception that mentorship is charity. "I'm giving up my time to help a junior." Wrong. Mentorship is an investment with compound returns.

The Feynman Technique

You don't truly understand a concept until you can explain it to a beginner. Mentoring forces you to solidify your own knowledge base. It reveals the gaps in your understanding.

How to Mentor Effectively

  • Don't Give Answers, Give Paths: Teach them how to debug, not just what the bug is.
  • Normalize Failure: Share your own war stories of bringing down production. Imposter syndrome thrives in isolation.
  • Sponsor: Mention their name in rooms they aren't in.

The Cycle

Senior engineers who don't mentor create a bottleneck. Senior engineers who DO mentor create a 10x team. The legacy of your code will fade (it will be refactored). The legacy of the people you helped will last a career.