Mentoring and onboarding new engineers is one of the most important things you
can do to grow your team. Effective and intentional mentoring decreases the number of bugs shipped to the Play Store, improves the quality of your application, and helps keep code standards high as your team grows and changes.
Yet for all of its importance, there is hardly any information about how to mentor effectively. There are many resources about how engineers can get 4% productivity gains by learning new Android Studio shortcuts, but there are almost none about how they can get 400% productivity gains for their team by helping other developers be more productive.
In this talk, I’ll discuss how to think about mentoring Android engineers from the ground-up. First, we’ll discuss how to structure a plan for your mentee such that they move from “What’s an ADB?” to “Let’s use Retrofit, RxJava, and Dagger to make a testable app with MVP architecture” in no-time flat. Next, we’ll talk about how to interact with your mentee such that every challenge helps them level-up their development skills and build your team culture. Lastly, we’ll discuss how you can use your experience as a mentor to improve your own engineering skills.
