Living by the Code by 2021

Author:2021
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ray Wenderlich

Leadership is closely tied to mentorship. What are your thoughts on mentorship in our community?

The thing about a mentor relationship is it’s volunteer time from both people, and the time of someone whom you would want mentoring you is extremely valuable. So, while some companies have mentorship programs and people can get involved with them, and they are very official, I’ve found that your career growth is your responsibility. Let’s start with that. That you will have managers and you will have mentors and you will have senior engineers to try to push on you and to try to help you but at the end of the day, you are an adult with a career and your growth is your responsibility.

So recognizing this, it’s critical to your growth to have a very good mentor to give you advice, push you in the right direction, set up accountability and give you the feedback that you need. But if we follow the idea that your career is your responsibility, it’s also your responsibility to drive finding that mentor. I think it’s especially important for a junior engineer. They need to step out of their comfort zone and they need to find someone and be active in advocating for that person to mentor them. They need to be extremely receptive to that person’s feedback as well. What I found before is that as a mentor, your time is valuable. If this person isn’t acting on your feedback and adjusting and making you feel like the advice that you’re giving is being utilized, then you might not be interested in continuing that relationship.

We’ve touched on several trends, here—remote work, career growth, mentorship. Are there any other trends you think are problematic and what would be your solution?

One thing that I’ve noticed in the last few years in the mobile space is a lot of the big companies focusing on creating huge apps with many teams working and creating features for those apps. The apps get quite bloated; you see this in everything from Google to Facebook to Uber. Once we started pushing on further app adoption in the emerging markets, the biggest constraints that came up were lower powered-devices and lower throughput networks—just a lot of constraints where these large-featured apps were considered problematic. The apps were too big and people can’t have them on their device, can’t download them on cellular, or their devices are too slow to run these large bloated apps.

So you started to see this prominent trend of creating light apps that are specific to certain regions. And I think, in spirit, that’s a good idea, recognizing that there are these other markets wherein you do have a large demographic of under-powered devices and trying to account for that. But what we’ve seen is that there’s a demand for light apps in general; it’s not just in those emerging markets. Because once those were available, once you had Facebook Messenger Lite emerged, for example, people in the United States, in Europe and other first-world countries with flagship devices began to prefer the Lite experience.

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