“Prestige” and “respect” are essentially synonyms, and careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management.
> What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?
Being perceived by management as delivering results rather than being the one behind the scenes enabling others to be perceived that way.
This is essentially a synonym of the sentence you quoted
> careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management
You're missing the point. By mentoring developers you become de facto management; it's willful, benevolent career advancement.
No one believes you can keep up the development sprints, or new technologies.
39 never noticed anything. Where do you work?
You can't imagine all the ways management can dismiss women's actions - "she's a great connector in that department. Let's leave her there, that's working great." or "sure she's got all the guys eating out of her hand. But lets talk leadership - Bob has got everybody afraid of him! Lets promote Bob"
Pay and promotion is about making yourself valuable. If you mentor engineers and gain a reputation for doing so, you're effectively shaping the culture of the organization, not to mention gives you a ton of leverage with the productive employees you taught to be productive.
It makes you far less disposable. When mixed with even amateur negotiating skills, that leads to promotion and better pay.
But the 'den mother' comment comes out of a real issue, of womens roles being sidelined. One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype.
In a better world, this would not be a thing. But here we are.
You make a good point, and I agree with the pragmatism of the choice, but I also believe mentorship can be a means of advancement.
The point of my original comment was to advocate for another choice - one that will both advance the mentor and their proteges. Hopefully, this will give us that better world we're looking for.
Yeah, I’m gonna bring gender into it, because I’m a woman and when women take on roles like this they often get pigeonholed into “den mother” stereotypes. That means less prestige and less prestige usually means less pay.
Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige. If you mentor three engineers, that's three warm bodies at your company who will have good things to say when asked about you. If you do a good job, you now have a team of four capable engineers who can get things done.
What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?