Mentorshit
Sometimes I get the impression, watching how tech companies operate, that I’m watching a movie in x2 speed. And not at that modern playback speed with pitch correction where actors simply talk faster in normal voices. No, it feels like the fast-forward on an old VHS tape—voices pitched an octave or two higher, shrill and distorted, while everything moves at a frantic pace. In fact, I often picture the circus music of Benny Hill and the slapstick absurdity of his episode endings, chasing each other back and forth with zero rhyme or reason.
In this industry, everything is compressed into a timeframe where companies are born, scale, and die far faster than any paperwork at your local city hall. Careers that under normal circumstances would span twenty years unfold in four—you are more likely to get a promotion before you can get an appointment to renew your passport. It is both comic and tragic: the very same people celebrating one corporate milestone after another are genuinely shocked and devastated when the lean times arrive and they are shown the door. Nobody saw it coming.
And so, before you have even figured out where you are standing, you are expected to extend a hand and help those behind you climb up. The playbook dictates that to keep moving forward you have to do things like "mentor," because junior profiles need a mentor. Meanwhile, you look around like someone stranded at an after-party at 6:00 AM with a lukewarm drink in hand, recognizing none of the faces you started the night with, trying to figure out how to pull off whatever this thing is just so they will give you a raise next year.
The first thing you rule out is dropping a round mint into diet cola to create a geyser—it's not Mentos—so you try to break the word down etymologically, because in ten years on the job all you have received are kicks in the teeth, certainly not mentorship. So you have MEN: men, right? Must be something we guys do (Mansplaining? Easy, second nature). Next is THOR, the Norse god played by Chris Hemsworth (honestly, that's literally me, this is going to be a breeze). And finally SHEEP? Must have something to do with wool. Knowing next to nothing about livestock, I just ask ChatGPT, which clears up all the doubts:
"From Ancient Greek Μέντωρ (Méntōr), a character in the Odyssey, tutor of Telemachus."
Well, that settles that.
After a meeting with HR where they explain that mentoring is all about having someone more experienced "share their wisdom and practical lessons to help newcomers avoid mistakes"—and that showing up to the office half-naked in a toga is considered inappropriate (and strictly a CEO prerogative)—you are finally ready to step into your senior role.
So you put some wool elbow patches on your leather jacket, or the other way around, and set out to hunt for a victim. The first colleague under thirty who crosses your path will be the chosen one: the unsuspecting junior sends you a message asking for help with a bug, and you hit them with a 45-minute meeting explaining that to get where you are today (doing the exact same job, just for an extra 5k a year), they need to save 500 pesetas and buy the next issue of Microhobby, because you learn a lot there.
Undoubtedly, your young colleague has learned his lesson: he will never make the mistake of asking you anything again, and will just ask the AI instead.
Trying to pigeonhole an organic human practice and reduce it to a bureaucratic checklist is the root problem behind this entire circus. Whether by genetic wiring or cultural heritage, human social behavior is inherently collaborative: in any healthy environment, those who arrived first naturally help the newcomers in one way or another. Labeling, ritualizing, and sanctifying every single behavior in search of a magic productivity formula—or a theatrical script to pitch to investors—is largely useless, and quite possibly harmful.
The senior who arrived here through a largely accidental path, under circumstances that will never be repeated, feels compelled to look back and advise the newcomer to retrace their steps. Yet that path isn't necessarily better, nor is it reproducible; following it strips the next generation of the freedom to discover the right approach for their own context. Survivorship bias blinds us to the fact that better ways might exist. The fact that this veteran survived to reach this level doesn't mean they possess superior traits; they were simply tying their shoelaces when everyone else got their head chopped off.
If, with all the goodwill in the world, you dictate the route, you are likely locking them into a local maximum—where your own ceiling becomes the hard line nobody else can cross. "Step where I step, and don't touch anything." What worked for Indiana Jones and Short Round in one specific setting (strikingly similar to the corporate world: a dark tunnel full of bugs and lethal booby traps) doesn't have to be a universal rule.
If you ask me, from my own limited experience, we all need examples to follow. We learn by watching others—their mistakes as much as their successes. As a senior, your responsibility isn't to fake infallibility, but to make both your strengths and your flaws visible. Forcing an immaculate persona behind the mask of a SMART goal—driven by the selfish need to score points for the review committee rather than genuine generosity in clearing the path for someone else—doesn't enrich company culture: it breeds a toxic dynamic where everyone hides their shortcomings just to look like caricatures out of a self-help book.
When you have spent thirty years watching people navigate the same pitfalls and possess empirical proof from testing dozens of alternatives, perhaps you can claim the title of master and preach openly. But if your position is purely factual—if you are simply there because you are there, and rewinding the tape would mean a butterfly flapping its wings in Central Park could have left you flipping burgers despite making the exact same decisions—honesty demands something else.
Listening to Kenny Rogers, I suspect the only sensible advice you can offer anyone who asks is that in this line of work, we are all just gamblers managing risk: you’ve got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em, because the only thing that truly matters is keeping enough chips to stay in the game for another day.
And with that, I fold. With any luck, you have found an ace here worth keeping.
`exit(0);`