What I Actually Do When Mentoring Junior Developers
Good mentorship isn't answering questions faster than a search engine. It's teaching someone to ask better questions of the code itself.
Tanjil Ahmed
Lead Software Engineer · Notionhive
The easiest way to fail a junior developer is to answer their question immediately, every time. It feels helpful and it produces someone who can't debug without you. The mentorship that actually builds independent engineers looks slower in the moment and faster over a year.
Ask the question they should have asked themselves
When someone brings me a bug, my first response is rarely the fix — it's 'what have you checked so far, and what did it tell you?' That single habit, repeated for months, is what actually builds debugging instinct. The fix I could give them solves today's bug. The question builds the skill that solves next year's.
- Pair on the hard 20% of a task; let them own the straightforward 80% alone.
- Review pull requests with questions, not just corrections — 'what happens if this is null?' teaches more than fixing it for them.
- Give context on why a pattern exists, not just what pattern to follow.
- Praise the debugging process publicly, not just the fix — it reinforces the behavior you want repeated.
The best thing I can teach a junior engineer isn't an answer. It's what question to ask next.