As I strongly believe in the effectiveness of mentoring, I have always had a preference for an environment where I can find access to direct mentoring. doing so can shape one’s career rapidly by avoiding learning detours and taking the right shortcuts.

Becoming a good software engineer is a pathway that has been taken many, many, many (put as many “manys” as you like) times before, and ignoring that or thinking otherwise is foolish and unstrategic in many ways.

Who Is a Direct Mentor?

The direct mentor is any person who is in consistent contact with you, who is overlooking your work and professional decisions, and who is providing consistent feedback and direction on them.

Typically, this can be a friend (peer mentor), a co-worker, a career adviser, or any person that you know or approached specifically for mentoring.

Choosing the right mentor is crucial. This is not only limited to the mentoring skill but also, to the attitude, strategy, and technical skills. Knowing the level of influence that the mentor can have on our career, one can only imagine how damaging it can be to have a bad one.

Unfortunately, for some of us and different reasons, it is difficult, nay impossible, to have a direct mentor.

Enter Indirect Mentoring

At the current state of the ecosystem, we can mitigate the absence of a direct mentor by seeking refuge in indirect mentoring.

Indirect mentoring is looking for remote people who are good in their domain, and letting them be our mentors without them knowing (not in the creepy sense). This means, learning from them by following their work and publications.

This concept is really powerful and, if used properly, it can be revealing and eye-opening.

There exist many ways to designate someone as an indirect mentor and an unordered list is to list a few ways that I have personally used and found beneficial (see what I did there) :

Reading their books: To fully know their philosophy, a book might be a very good and detailed medium and sometimes this is the only viable option when we want to learn from authors who are no longer with us.
Watching their lectures and/or conferences.
Taking their online workshop.
Listening to their Podcasts and interviews.
Reading their newsletters and/or articles: This usually offers an incremental approach to knowing, and learning about the subject.
Following them in social media: Their online discussion might be beneficial to dissect their ideas, in addition to that, it offers the option to participate in the discussion which will bring you even closer to the source of knowledge. Depending on the value of their online presence, I even active notifications for some of them.

With Indirect mentoring, you are not limited to only what your environment offers but you can reach whatever subject, or learning objective you can think of, and have an indirect mentor about it.

This is rather a short article, but I wanted to put in words what helped me to know things I could have never known and directed my knowledge towards a land that I would have never visited without the guidance of those indirect mentors I chose to have. This begs a list of all those (super)people I follow (coming soon).