The answer to “Will you mentor me?” is no (2010)

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-will-you-mentor-me-is.html

by brudgers • 7 years ago

294 81 7 years ago

pindancing.blogspot.com

dang• 7 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994998

simaracode• 7 years ago

Never read it before, priceless and true.

jseliger• 7 years ago

Developing the ability to be an attractive, as opposed to hapless, mentee is also a skill: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pr... and it's one that's sadly not taught.

alltakendamned• 7 years ago

Insightful article on how mentors might perceive your actions

clvx• 7 years ago

This sounds exactly the same as when you are looking for help in a public mailing list. I usually list everything I’ve done right or wrong to pick anyone’s interest to give me some clues to continue my work.

chillwaves• 7 years ago

This demonstrates effort, which in turns demonstrates capability. Why waste time on someone who will not try?

mgamache• 7 years ago

I am being pedantic, but I hate the word mentee. I am not sure if it was made up, but it sounds like it. The proper word IMHO is protege.

isbwkisbakadqv• 7 years ago

I would replace mentee with telemachus. That’s who mentor taught!

colechristensen• 7 years ago

You hate it because mentor _is not_ adding the -er suffix to a verb like ment or some such. -er and its opposite -ee suffix are strictly english/germanic in origin (although possibly adapted from Latin at some point, there aren't Latin equivalents)

Mentor is of greek and latin extraction directly, there's no -er suffix added to a verb, it is a noun outright.

It is ... inappropriate to match mentor with mentee because the former doesn't have the -er suffix.

Obviously all words are "made up" but mentor/mentee doesn't follow existing patterns, it was just created by people who don't know or care and has persisted.

In the Odyssey, Mentor was a sort of advisor to Odysseus and that is presumably where the word comes from.

jacobolus• 7 years ago

Nitpick: he was Odysseus’s buddy who was assigned to look after Odysseus’s son Telemachus (and while we are at it, a lot of the “mentoring” was done by Athena disguised as Mentor), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_(Odyssey)

koolba• 7 years ago

It’s not the same thing. A protege is one person done your are grooming to be your replacement. A mentee is one of many people your are guiding down their own path.

Sean1708• 7 years ago

This was always my understanding of the word too, but I've just looked it up and apparently a protégé is just "one who is protected or trained or whose career is furthered by a person of experience, prominence, or influence" so in a mentor-student relationship the student could definitely be referred to as a protégé.

duxup• 7 years ago

It is an understandable policy.

The person being asked has no idea where the asking person is at or even if they should be doing that thing at all.

If there is nothing to show.... you have no clue.

sdan• 7 years ago

Nice article. Well written!

wehrkeoruw• 7 years ago

It's gatekeeping, isn't it (in a good way)? Demonstrating you give a shit (rather than saying it) goes a long way.

I went to a meetup around where I live that was meant for developers on my area. What ended up happening was half the group were practicing developers who wanted to socialize a bit more, and the other half were people who were "super passionate" about programming and wanted to talk nonstop about their ideas. Unfortunately I got stuck with the latter half, due to seating, so I had to field all kinds of "Do you think this is a good idea?" questions the whole time. It sucked.

povertyworld• 7 years ago

Sounds like every IRC channel ever. The topic is some open source project or programming language, but eventually it just becomes a clique of regulars who stopped caring about the topic a long time ago, and now just tell people who want to discuss it to go read the manual.

toast0• 7 years ago

I mean, we're mostly all programming because it's interesting. Answering the same questions over and over isn't interesting, that's why it's in the manual. Asking an interesting question will usually get an interesting result.

For example, I tried X, the manual said it should do Y, but Z happened instead, what's going on?

felipemnoa• 7 years ago

This is nice but I like this advice much better:

Ira Glass quote: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. <

Waterluvian2• 7 years ago

I love that perspective. To add to it, from personal experience: it really helps to be totally, wildly, embarrassingly ignorant of your incompetence at the start. It softens that part where your work disappoints you, because you don't know better. Now, I don't know if this is actually good advice or even actionable, advice, but I've seen it and experienced it many times and it very much enabled me to move past awfulness.

- My first programs (I thought `super` gave you access to the UI component's hierarchical owner)

- My first music videos (wow super cringey teen stuff)

- My first 3D animations (oh so you're supposed to use "textures"?)

- Why I never got good at guitar (constantly focused on how my whole family had to suffer how awful I was)

All formative experiences I may have never dove so deeply into if I was consciously aware of just how far off the mark I was. I can't even look at any of these examples today because I cringe so hard at myself.

yurishimo• 7 years ago

Your guitar story reminded me of my one of my own. My uncle gave me an old crappy guitar for Christmas while they were driving through to visit other relatives. He was a signed musician at the time so he had all sorts of extra instruments laying around that companies would send him just because.

Later that next year for my birthday (today actually, but a few years ago!), my family gave me one of those "Learn Guitar" books with an included DVD. At this point I had been playing for about 8 months and they actually said they had bought it way back in March or April because I was so bad they wanted me to get better for their own sanity. However, they said they almost felt bad giving it to me then because it didn't seem like I needed it anymore.

I had progressed far enough that it didn't sound like terrible screeching anymore and was mostly passable music. Simple chords and basic strumming patterns sure, but music nonetheless. :)

So if you've still got your guitar, I urge you to pull it out and give it another shot. Find some songs you like that are simple and just keep at it. Making music should always be about expressing yourself first and pleasing others second.

Good luck :)

shostack• 7 years ago

I wish I still had my music videos and more of the art I made. I found stuff I created when I was a teenager and younger that I'd totally forgotten about. Things I modeled in software, things I sketched, things I built from Lego, things I wrote, music I made, things I crafted from wood and leather by hand.

I almost got teary eyed thinking about how amazing adult me considered the work of child me and all of the free time and creative energy that came with it. I'd do anything to be able to get that kind of creativity back. But I suspect it was a function of both youth and not having a job that draws upon my mental resources so heavily.

MaulingMonkey• 7 years ago

An alternative to ignorance is to be enthralled by the process. I knew many of my programs weren't great or amazing growing up, but I was too into the puzzle of how programs and programming works to care. The result was, frankly, secondary to the process.

I'm not an amazing piano player, but with a MIDI keyboard and headphones I can gameify it, enjoy the process of practice and learning, measure progress even when it's sometimes hard to see, and do this all even if I'm still skittish about actually performing any of it for others.

With something like art - I have trouble seeing my progress, gamifying it, I have a certain vicious judgement of my own work beyond what I judge the art of others by, and I'm not particularly into the process for it's own sake. I haven't made any progress there since high school!

SenHeng4• 7 years ago

I've seen this interview pop up several times but I've always lacked the context to properly understand it, because I don't know who Ira Glass is and what he has done. I don't deny that it's good advice, but who is this guy and why should I listen to him?

seafood• 7 years ago

He's the host of an NPR radio program called This American Life.

markelliot• 7 years ago

Ira Glass is the creator and host of a long running radio show called This American Life on National Public Radio. The show runs weekly and tells stories of Americana and other things. I suspect part of what makes the show famous is that it coined not just a particular kind of show, but a particular kind of sound, editing and production, that, I’d say set the standard for modern audio programs.

Several of the shows producers (and Ira’s mentees) have gone on to create other famous shows:

- Sarah Koenig created Serial, one of the first truly mainstream podcasts (1M listeners in its first week) for telling, in the first season, the story of a murder of Haymen Lee and investigating whether the man convicted, Adnan Syed, was likely innocent.

- Alex Blumberg created Planet Money, a short radio show that explores economics and explains it by looking at what’s happening, culturally, around the world. Later, Blumberg founded Gimlet, a podcast company that recently sold to Spotify for $100M, ostensibly to create content with that, now famous, NPR _sound_. Some of the bigger/more famous work from Gimlet is Startup (now also a TV show in the US), Homecoming (now also a show on Amazon Prime Video), Reply All, and Conviction.

Anyway, Ira Glass has hosted This American Life since the beginning, and Blumberg recently interviewed him for a show Gimlet produces called Without Fail. If you’re looking to understand his impact in this space, I think that’s a wonderful place to start.

*edited to correct where the Homecoming TV show airs.

coldtea• 7 years ago

I don't deny that it's good advice, but who is this guy and why should I listen to him?

Shouldn't you listen to it because it's good advice, regardless of who the guy is?

And isn't it a Google search away from knowing everything about the person?

momokoko2• 7 years ago

Taste is for curators who masquerade as creators.

The actual concept for people who create is that your hand is behind your eye.

Edit: To the asshole downvoter. This is actually serious advice that myself and many others have found very important in our lives doing creative work. Censoring it is a total shit thing to do. Especially when you appear to have nothing additional to add.

Buge• 7 years ago

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tashi• 7 years ago

What does "your hand is behind your eye" mean, and how does that relate to taste? I don't understand what advice you're giving.

(FYI, your comment could have come across as implying that Ira Glass is a fraud who's just a "curator" pretending to be a "creator," so that could be why someone took offense.)

phaus• 7 years ago

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

On the whole, I agree with his sentiment that hard work will get you success, but the idea he magically started out with some kind of innate talent for telling whether or not things are good is the same type of illogical thinking he's talking about being discouraging to beginners.

flancian• 7 years ago

I agree. It seems that his overall position could be stronger if he just started with the requisite of having some taste. Which everybody has.

It'd still all ring true, and be more general, in the sense that one's taste is linked to who one is (your unique background and life experience). So in general this condition of relative uniqueness, saying nothing of it's subjective quality or goodness, could still be enough to make one's creative efforts worth something, inasmuch they'll probably be relatively unique.

simonh• 7 years ago

I think you're interpreting 'good taste' too narrowly. A sense of the value of things is what motivates people to want to produce them. So if you value nice things enough to want to make more of them, that's 'good taste'. He's not saying taste is an immutable attribute that cannot be refined.

He's not writing an essay on the relationship between taste, skill and creativity and how they feed back into each other. I think he's just saying stick in there. It's tough for everyone in the beginning, and this is one reason why.

gameswithgo• 7 years ago

Talent is a real thing, it isn't magic. Each of us has a unique brain with unique programming/experience and some of us are more or less capable at various tasks. When I type stuff like this out I start to wonder why this has to be explained.

lootsauce• 7 years ago

Entirely agree. In art school our instructors often spoke of developing your eye. By seeing many things, thinking about them in depth and doing exercises you develop the skills needed to appreciate, differently the things you see. It was never about fostering some innate "taste" or aesthetic you had to get out. Talent surely does exist but you have no idea about it as a beginner. Talent functions on a level far beyond what most people think, before that comes passion, much time invested and the fruits of this are what most people mistake as talent.

dllthomas• 7 years ago

He doesn't say anyone "magically started out" with good taste. He's saying he had it when he started trying to get good at making his own stuff. At that point, he - presumably - had a lot of experience consuming media, and he had plenty of time to develop his understanding of what he thought was "good" and "not good". It's true that that understanding doesn't necessarily match society at large, although in the case of Ira his success indicates that it matched well enough with enough people.

Something that's not mentioned in the quote but that I think is really important is the fact that the media he was consuming in training his "ear" was - in our culture of mass-media - predominately produced by some of the very best of the very best (by some metric). Of course your early efforts are going to pale by comparison.

sverhagen• 7 years ago

Within the context of people learning to code, I feel that many people in this field don't "distaste" their work until they're shown the next step up they can make. So, not mentoring to know where to start, but mentoring to discover where to go next?

Sukotto• 7 years ago

Zen pencils has a lovely take on that: https://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginne...

rimliu• 7 years ago

That was exactly the problem I identified with my photography. I can identify and appreciate the good stuff, but my skills are lagging behind. So frustrating.

sxv• 7 years ago

This is nice but I don't see how it is relevant to the article: "Here's some advice about mentorship." -- "Here is better unrelated advice!"

sh872• 7 years ago

... the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work ... It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions

This volume of work coupled with a closed feedback loop (Do - observe - measure - tweak - Do) allows for achieving astonishing results. Also taking a skill apart, practicing and improving individual skills and then putting it all together is the basis of acquiring and mastering skill.

I do not believe a mentor can help with acquiring skill. But a good mentor can quickly identify and guide you to the parts that need attention and practice.

DangitBobby• 7 years ago

Sure, but you don't get to complain about the next generation of programmers re-discovering every wheel that's been invented in the past 60 years (or worse variations of them).

timoth3y3• 7 years ago

There has been a significant devaluation of the term "mentor" over the past 15 years or so. The word used to imply a mutual respect and commitment that it no longer does.

A mentor's counterpart used to their "protege". However, since that word has not been devalued, we've invented "mentee".

I'm not claiming this is a good or bad development, but it's interesting how quickly the meanings of even quite important words can change.

taeric3• 7 years ago

The double speak in your last paragraph undercut your post. :(

Be bold and make a claim. Nothing wrong with that. Even if you are wrong, you will be so with skin in the game, so come out knowing. With couched claims, you can always duck behind being right, but not understood. And never know.

soneca2• 7 years ago

Or they are not certain if it is good or bad

timoth3y3• 7 years ago

The double speak in your last paragraph undercut your post. :(

It's honestly not double-speak. I'm a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. Words are defined by how people use them. I consider it a waste of time to complain that "everyone is using a word wrong" as long as the meaning is clear, which it is in this case.

topkai22• 7 years ago

The mentor-protégé relationship has been deconstructed. The coaching and development part is called the mentor - mentee relationship, and the career promotion aspect is called sponsorship (sponsor-sponsee.)

From experience, this is probably a good thing organizationally- I've successfully coached and mentored people I wouldn't sponsor, leading to a net benefit.

timoth3y3• 7 years ago

I don't think it's been deconstructed so much as it has been re-branded. Coaching has always been and remains a perfectly accurate term to describe, well... coaching.

It seems to me that the current meaning of "mentor" is the result of the term's (mis)use by VCs and accelerator programs to make coaching sessions seem like something more than they really are.

I've never heard the term "sponsee" used in this context, but like I said, meanings change pretty fast, don't they?

wolco2• 7 years ago

Offering money or something can go a long way.

michaelt2• 7 years ago

IDK about the money angle.

I mean, how's a student going to pay the hourly rate of an average mid-career FAANG employee - to say nothing of a CEO, VC or famous coder?

esmi• 7 years ago

Mid-career FAANG employee, I guess it might be ~$100/hr for a one time code review. (Incidentally, About the same rate as getting a chess GM to review your game [1]) Someone might do that if the project wasn’t too large. (Although their employment contract might not allow it.) Not cheap but maybe not totally out of reach either. Pretty questionable how useful it would be, IMHO.

[1]. https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/3hgoip/typical_coach...

wolco2• 7 years ago

Wash dishes or cook a meal once a week. The amount would based on the individuals.

A CEO shouldn't be the ideal target of a student. There is a lot to offer the student but little for the CEO unless they are related or doing a favour. A junior exec makes more sense.

Someone 10 years away makes a better mentor relationship than 50 years.

devxpy2• 7 years ago

The most relatable piece of this article, as a college kid in Bangalore, is this

For some reason Bangalore is crawling with people who first want to form a community and then start learning/working/whatever. These efforts almost invariably peter out uselessly. First do the work. Then if you feel like "communing" talk to others who are also working hard.

asplake• 7 years ago

Not for a long time a student and not from Bangalore (though I have visited a couple of times), but that footnote stood out for me too

devxpy2• 7 years ago

My opinion:

It's sad that we have such a terrible education system. It's an insult to injury that the "BigCo" consistently fuel these learning groups as a marketing stunt.

I can't begin to describe the sheer amount of bright peers that think using the GCP/Amazon web interface is equivalent to real programming.

wsxcde• 7 years ago

As someone below noted, there's nothing Bangalore-specific about this. This is coming from a native Bangalorean who moved away about eight years ago.

It's just human nature to want to sit around and chat rather than actually spend hours of your time on hard work which may or may not pan out into something useful.

stackzero• 7 years ago

Don't ask "will you mentor me?" just ask a specific question and you've got a mentor

wccrawford• 7 years ago

I think that advice is buried in the stories the article tells, and I wish the writer had made it more clear.

I spent quite a lot of time trying to help people who were asking for general advice, and my take is that very, very few of them actually did anything with it.

Soon, I realized that answering these question privately is a complete waste of time, and switched to answering them publicly. At least then if the person ignores it, it's still there for someone else to benefit from.

Eventually, I realized that all these questions have been answered hundreds or thousands of times in the same general ways, and that anyone who cared would just use Google and find all of them. The people who are now asking the question either lack the basic awareness to use Google, or think their situation is somehow special and only very pointed advice can help them. They're wrong, of course, which means you can't really help them.

Now, I only answer questions that I feel are actually unique somehow, or that I haven't answered in a while and just want to do a little good and maybe inspire some people.

In no circumstance do I react negatively to them. I just ignore questions that bother me, rather than tell them to "Just Google It" or whatever. If they haven't figured that out, my negativity won't actually help them or anyone else.

mmaunder• 7 years ago

"For some reason Bangalore is crawling with people who first want to form a community and then start learning/working/whatever."

Seattle is the same. Probably the same everywhere. It's easier to talk and drink coffee than to challenge yourself way outside your comfort zone for hours at a time, day after day.

soneca2• 7 years ago

I don't think the foundation of this phenomenon is laziness or lack of diligence. I believe people are craving to be part of a community. Humans have always had. But these days your family and your neighbors are not that community anymore (edit: not necessarily, not so much at least), so we look elsewhere. The internet allowed us to look everywhere actually. Then you find a community that, from the outside, you feel attracted to. Often these communities are built around a certain topic or skill. Then you want to be part of the community and say to yourself that you will learn that skill.

I agree with the author though that this path rarely works. A better way is to first you dive into something that interest you and then you go find other people with the same interest.

TrackerFF• 7 years ago

To be fair, that's probably 80% of the entrepreneurship scene everywhere.

When I was a fresh MBA, I was looking all over for things to do. I looked into the local startup scene, especially those in the extremely early stages - and discovered that the _actual_ startups are a very small part of any local startup scene.

The majority of people seemed to just sit around and talk about their ideas with like-minded people, but with close to zero experience or critical skills.

You could go this weekday entrepreneurship workshop, and not a single person in the room had started a venture, or worked for any - not even the speakers.

shiitake• 7 years ago

I hosted a software dev meetup in Texas for several years and also saw this. Especially when we co-hosted with another meetup that was devoted to beginners.

I observed a few common threads:

1. A lot of beginners don't know exactly WHY they want to do XYZ. Why do you want to learn to code? Or play guitar? Or be an entrepreneur? Or make video games? It is perfectly okay to want to do something because it is potentially lucrative. But there really needs to be more to it. If you are passionate about XYZ - which parts specifically? Do you like building things to solve problems? Or writing songs? Or telling stories?

2. Most beginners have done very little basic research about what is involved in actually doing XYZ. I always asked beginner devs if they thought they could be happy spending 6+ hours a day thinking/writing/debugging code. Nobody else had ever mentioned that to them - they'd just been told "learn to code".

If you can get through those beginner questions the advice is always a variation on the same theme: do XYZ to whatever degree you can. Don't get distracted by meetings or tools or blog posts.

hartator• 7 years ago

I might be a minority but never extracted huge value from mentors. Read books, reach out directly to whoever you want to reach out, and trust your guts’ feeling have worked better for me.

m0zg• 7 years ago

A lot of people out there just go through the motions. They aren't particularly interested in their field, and seek "mentors" just because this is something you're supposed to do. This is a waste of time for both the mentor and the mentee. In 20+ years in the industry I only had one mentee (out of half a dozen), who was not a waste of time. She's a senior manager at Facebook now. Super smart, and very strongly intrinsically motivated. She'd succeed without any mentorship just fine, but hopefully I helped her get there faster.

noncoml• 7 years ago

Despite the assholish title, the blog post actually makes a very good point and it’s a pretty good advice. Before you ask somebody to spend them time on you, make sure you put the time yourself.

PeterStuer• 7 years ago

It comes down to trust and expectation. Everyone can say they are passionate, interested, want to do the hard work to make the mentor's investment in them eventually worth it. Those are very weak signals. On the other hand, actually having demonstrably put in a very significant amount of effort already is a strong proof you are being serious.

codeisawesome• 7 years ago

The StackOverflow advice to writing answer worthy questions generalises quite well into all professional interactions where help is exchanged.

dunkelheit• 7 years ago

This is good advice because talk is very very cheap and by actually doing something you stand out of the crowd. But doing something in a field that is new to you can be daunting and learning on your own is still very inefficient. That is why those Stanford PhDs are still worth something even if all relevant information is online - they had good mentors.

Here are some tricks that I find make learning process less inefficient (as applied to programming of course):

- Formulate specific questions. This is kind of silly but many times you will have a feeling of being vaguely stuck and will just zone out instead of making progress. Instead try to precisely and succinctly formulate the problem. You can then search the Internet, ask a question on stackoverflow (or ask a mentor :) or you can look through some good open source code and see how the problem is solved there. Formulating the question focuses you. It is important to condense the question as much as you can because this way people will have to do less work to understand it and the probability that you will get an answer goes up.

- Find a way to test your stuff. I don't mean specifically unit tests, it can be "testing in production" with the real users (it is standard startup wisdom to get user feedback as quickly as possible) or at least solving toy problems with your code, or creating a benchmarking harness and seeing where the performance bottlenecks are. First, seeing that your stuff is actually working is incredibly motivating. Second, your taste (what the Ira Glass quote in the sibling comment talks about) is subjective and can mislead you (especially if you are a beginner) and making your code confront reality is much more objective and is going to uncover problems with your work that you weren't aware of and maybe show that some problem that you thought very important is actually not a problem at all.

- Watch programming streams. This thing is getting more popular these days. Much of mentoring consists of you observing how your mentor actually does stuff - how they approach problems and what are those little tricks that help them do the work - and then copying it. Watching people programming sounds silly but it is the way to observe those tricks if you are not lucky to have easy access to someone competent.

lmilcin• 7 years ago

The only time you can really provide mentoring is if the person wants it and asks for it. It is not yet enough because the person may say they want it but have wrong impression of what it entails (like having expectation of some kind of magical step change in their life), but it is prerequisite IMO.

So, obviously, this answer is wrong beacuse that would mean that there cannot be any mentoring.

Another observation of mine is what is mentoring for. A person that isn't interested in learning something will not learn it no matter if the do or don't have a mentor. A person that wants to learn something will also learn it regardless of whether they have mentor.

The role of mentor is to expedite the process, help avoid dead ends or bad habits and generally make the end result better and faster than without mentor.

I can learn to be Enterprise Architect or play flute on my own, but having a mentor makes it easier for me.

I pay for a flautist to teach me but really I don't want him to teach me. I teach flute myself and the flautist is to point out errors, tips that help me learn it faster, his experience of how he learned it, all to let me reach goals that I set with less effort.

The problem people have is the moment they get a "teacher" they assume some kind of shared responsibility or even expectation that the student will somehow offload part of the effort onto the "teacher". That is simply wrong.

radcon• 7 years ago

So in the next email (sent a minute after I received his reply) I sent him a zipped file of code with an explanation that "this is what I've done so far which is about 70% of what you want" and he immediately replied saying "Whoa you are serious. That is refreshing .. '
So a few days later, I sent along a detailed algorithm that expanded his idea, with a formal proof of correctness and a code implementation and he suddenly switched to a more expansive mode, sending friendly emails with long and detailed corrections and ideas for me to explore.

And then the whole internet stood up and clapped.

sodosopa• 7 years ago

Anyone who is better than you at a skill or task is a mentor. All it takes is to work around them, ask relevant questions, watch, do and shut up.

The answer to “Will you mentor me?” is no (2010)

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