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Any recommendations/tips for mentorship services? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Yes_Man@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev

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I've had a very tough time finding my first position as a junior dev and have been looking into getting a paid mentor to help me out. Someone who can give me a specific, clear idea of what skills I might need to have, refine, etc, as well as some looser guidance and direction after losing my confidence.

Do any of you have experience with services like this? Somewhere like Mentor Cruise or something similar?

Edit: to be clear, I'm looking for my first role as a web developer, ideally frontend with React (which is what I feel most confident in). I've been at this for over a year and a half - I do have a portfolio, Github, etc with projects in JS and some basic Python. I'm aware of how to look for a job, but actually getting anyone to look at me has been the hard part, as I've only had two interviews that went nowhere. The handful of people who've seen my portfolio seemed fine with it and the impression I have is that it is enough to demonstrate my skill level, but I'm still getting very little back.

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[–] RonSijm@programming.dev 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Since others already suggested mostly on-topic suggests, here's an alternative suggestion:

Instead of looking specifically for a mentor - look for an open source project that you can help with. Ideally one with a discord or something to it's easy to be in contact the the lead dev. A lot people don't mind mentoring juniors, but in my experience it doesn't happens that explicitly - "be my mentor" - and it might sound like you're asking them a lot.

If you invert it into "Hey I wanna help you with your open-source project, but I don't really know what to do, what your expectations are, how to implement a specific feature" - then you're offering to do work them, instead of asking for something. And implicitly you'll get mentorship in return.

And "real" projects probably also look better on your github / portfolio than only some dummy projects for learning purposes

[–] astrsk@fedia.io 5 points 1 month ago

Was going to mention this. Finding a smaller community focused on a specific project can afford more collaborative learning while contributing to projects that need help. It’s also a good way to learn humility, like finding that one person in the corner of the office who constantly picks apart your PRs without any emotion or judgement and genuinely improves your own code by learning from mistakes.