Call me a pessimist but I doubt the vast majority of people will ever find true mentorship. Would it be nice to have a more experienced and talented developer take a personal interest in your career and technical development? yes, of course it would, but it's unlikely at best. I'm sure self study, discipline and "grit" matter far more.

>>I'm sure self study, discipline and "grit" matter far more.

Sure, but mentors help ensure that you learn the right lessons from your struggles, gain the correct habits and don't go down certain silly rabbit holes and waste time.

And they never will with that kind of attitude.

Personally, I was fortunate enough to have a mentor when I was starting out and it rocketed me to a strong position in my career and I couldn't be more grateful. I try to actively mentor 1 or 2 people a year as a result.

It's been mostly very successful so far.

What does it actually mean "to have a mentor" or "to mentor somebody"? What kind of activity is this? Because I constantly see people talking about it, but I've never seen a satisfactory explaination.

The dictionary does a pretty good job of defining it, though it omits something pretty important in practice. That is, to mentor is to advise or train someone.

The omission there is that there are, mostly, concrete goals that the mentee aims to achieve, and the mentor is personally invested in a successful outcome.

I think it matters more for most people, because they can't get a good mentor. I guess that having one of the top 1000 devs in the world as mentor does carry less risk for your career.

But more than 99% of us aren't that lucky and have to try with self study and "grit".

For those who lack colleagues sitting by and ready to help you getting involved into open source will provide you a kind of mentoring.

Then there are people who will mentor you for money. Giles Bowkett (http://gilesbowkett.com) did this a while a go. Not bad option at all. I'd see paying for someone way smarter than my self to teach me as an amazing investment.

I too would welcome a mentor!

I've often thought this would be a good social network - online mentoring. Lots of upside for the mentee, not sure about the mentor...

The upside for the mentor is that their methods are carried through to the next generation of developers.

People like mentoring, it's human nature.

But that will challenging to capture online.

At university, I hold office hours for a mid-level CS course, and it is incredibly rewarding to do so in person, as you can see the flicker of understanding on their face when they get it. That's going to be very hard to capture online.

Many people told me, that teaching and mentoring helped them getting better themself.

>But that will challenging to capture online.

Unless there's some barrier to entry it would be difficult, and it'd probably just end up being a spam or meme fest like LinkedIn or Facebook after a while.

That's _almost_ the startup we created ~3.5 years ago (still going today!) https://www.uvize.com/

It's not 100% online mentorship though. It's really there to facilitate / manage / help existing mentorship programs at organizations.

We thought about trying to get it to a point where it could work with non-associated mentors/mentees, but it's really a chicken/egg problem at that point.

Vetting mentors is also not an easy thing to solve if you were offering a service for it.

I've had "assigned" mentorship at places (which is understandable and I have no immediate complaints) but I feel, personally, being in a supportive environment of coworkers is as good, if not better, than pure mentorship.