Limits of Mentoring

You know that feeling, when someone makes a statement and your guts say that it is fundamentally, resoundingly wrong — but you don’t know why?

Today I’m going to talk through one of these statements, now (years later) that I think I understand why it was so off-putting. First, some context.

I was sitting in a small room, with my new boss, and it was my first annual review at a company where I worked as a team lead. It was a fine review. Good work, good leadership, great programming, try not to piss so many people off next year. The usual.

Still, I was angry.

My new boss was going over the goals for the coming year. First and foremost was to ship the new software by the deadline, three months away. There was no way in God’s Green Earth that was going to happen. See, the reason I was sitting with my new boss is that the VP declared a month earlier that we were going to fire all of our consultants. The old boss (to their credit) said, “We’re not firing two-thirds of my engineers four months from the deadline — not while I’m in charge”. The old boss was promptly fired, along with the five best engineers on my team and most of my neighboring teams’ people.

Some consultancy had convinced the VP that they could guarantee the software would ship by the deadline (spoiler alert: it did not). The neighbor teams would be supplied by the consultancy, and my team would be back-filled with half as many full-time employees. So not only was I losing my five best engineers, I was expected to replace them with three engineers foolish enough to take the company’s below market compensation. Oh, and do two years of work in three months.

I of course told my new boss (again) that this was all bullshit, they were setting me up for failure, and there was no way these goals were achievable with a bunch of so-so team members. Then they said it:

Matt, you’re a fantastic programmer. Why can’t you just take and copy all of that know-how that makes you a fantastic programmer to your team?

Cue that face I make when my inner rage, disappointment, and confusion are all having a battle royale to decide the proper response. I knew I couldn’t do that, but I didn’t really understand why. At the time, I placed the blame on intrinsic traits. My near-constant critical analysis of… everything wasn’t something I could give to others. It certainly wasn’t something others would want, and my boss certainly didn’t want a team…