Building Careers Through Mentorship with Sterling Chin – Techstrong Unplugged EP46

Welcome back to Textron Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chen, and today we have Sterling Chen, Not related. Yeah, my last name's also Chen, so can you introduce yourself?

Yeah. So, uh, my name is Sterling and I work for Postman. Um, I'm a senior developer advocate, but in my career I've been a developer.

I've been a junior engineer all the way up to senior tech lead, moved into engineering management, and, uh, I love everything career, you know, talking about anything around our careers. So you said you have like a passion for mentorships? I do.

Mentorship to me is one of the, is something that I learned early on in my career. I had a great teacher, a great mentor of mine, uh, and if he ever sees this, his name is Andrew, uh, shout out to him. Uh, he taught me early on that not only how, talking about how important it's to find mentorship, to find a mentor, but also to mentor others.

And because of that, at every subsequent company that I've worked for, I have, I have started mentorship programs, both official and unofficial mentorship programs that, you know, bring engineers up to the ranks. There's not enough that happens. Um, and so I can take any kind of avenue you want with it.

Um, you know, I, we can talk about, you know, offic making any official things, um, what we talk about in mentorship programs. But, you know, the, for me, the only way to get into your, um, as you move into your career is to get mentored. Um, no one else is gonna mentor you.

No one's, no one's gonna come to you as a junior engineer and say, Hey, can I mentor you? That doesn't happen. So you have to take, take your career by the horns and say, I'm gonna go find someone to men.

I'm gonna go find someone to mentor me. What is like a mentorship actually? Like, what do you learn?

And It's kind of everything. So the way I, the way I like to structure my mentorships is I have a hard, fast role that they're not someone on my team. Now, that sounds a little counterproductive, but if I'm mentoring someone, I don't want them on my team.

And that is for a couple reasons. One, I'm assuming that I'm already mentoring people on my team, or I'm already getting, or if I'm a junior, I'm already getting mentored by the rest of my team, right? I've got senior engineers who are gonna be looking at my code, they're gonna be working with me from on a day-to-day basis.

And so they're already gonna know a lot about, a lot about, you know, how I code, why I code or, or, or so on and so forth. So that's my first hard fast rule. My second rule is that it is an open book.

It is completely driven by the mentee. Um, so for me, if I'm being mentored, I'm gonna be asking questions. I'm a safe place for mentees to come and ask any questions no matter what.

And I think that's why I also have that hard, fast rule that it's not on the same team. Because sometimes as a junior engineer, you're a little, you feel a little awkward. You're like, that may be a stupid question, or may be something that you've, you know, a senior engineer on your team has asked, or you've asked the senior engineer multiple times, and you feel kind of, you feel embarrassed to ask that question again.

Um, at a, for me, as a mentor, having like, I, I can sit down and say, look, you can ask me any question you want. You can ask me what the, the quote unquote dumb questions and know that I'm not going to judge you in any way, shape, or form. I'm here to teach you.

I'm here to, uh, I'm here to like, help you get better to that next level. Um, and so the second, the, the, the second aspect of that is that there's always goals in mind. There's always an outcome goal.

What are you trying to get better at? Are you a frontend engineer? Then?

My hope is as a frontend engineer, I'm gonna be teaching you. If I'm mentoring you, for instance, I'm gonna be teaching you all the ins and outs of building react components, JavaScript type script, CSS, why you use one thing or another, why, what's the difference between a four loop and a and a while loop? You know, when to use them, when to, you know, when to use if, you know, uh, switch, switch case statements.

So I see that as a teaching moment. Um, and I take that very seriously. So that was the third, the third part of it.

Uh, the second one or the fourth, I'm switching up my numbers here. I think I'm at, I'm at four now. Um, I would talk about is having a regular meeting every week or every other week and having it for at least half an hour, 45 minutes.

Um, it gives you enough time to come in, ask questions, um, but then it also is not enough, not long enough that you're, you know, I'm breaking into like momentum somewhere else. So oftentimes it's afternoons because most of your meetings are in the mornings. Um, so, and that's, yeah, kinda the structure.

Do you learn from being a mentor yourself? Oh, 100%. It's why.

So the the next avenue, I, I would, we were gonna go, and I love that you asked me. That is the moment I find someone to mentor my, so my initial mentor, Andrew, within two months, and I was a junior engineer at the time, so I had no idea what the heck I was doing. He came in and said, okay, Sterling, I've mentored you for two months now.

You need to go and find a mentee. I asked him like, what the heck are you talking about? I am in no way positioned to mentor someone else.

And he said, no, every time you teach somebody, every time you teach someone a new skill, you yourself are solidifying it and learning it yourself. So how we did it in, in my mentor pro or, or how we mentored in that case is Andrew would teach me, and that I would teach the pre the people I was mentoring. And so he would talk about regex, he'd go, okay, we're gonna, this week we're gonna focus on regex.

If there was, if I had other questions, he would obviously, um, you know, you, I could ask them at that point, but sometimes he had come up with say, Hey, we're gonna focus on RegX, or we're gonna focus on a skill that you haven't yet mastered. And then the, the goal at that point was, after he taught me about RegX, my job was not to go teach my mentees about RegX. And he goes, that, that act of teaching, it solidifies the skills and the knowledge in your head, because now I have to be ready to answer those questions that I was just even a week ago asking those same questions to him.

So absolutely mentoring is a learning experience for both. And like, where can you find a mentorship or be a mentee? So if, if you're at one of my companies that I've worked for, I built, uh, and integrated like full on mentorship programs within the companies.

If not, I would go and actually seek out mentorship. Uh, I would find someone that you respect. So if you're at a company and you're on a, you're on a dev team, I would immediately go find someone within the company that you, that you respect and just ask them straight up, will you, Ben, will you mentor me?

I'm looking for a mentor to someone, someone to teach me, you know, JavaScript, someone to get me to that next level. Um, if you're brand new in the career and have, don't, and, and you're looking for jobs, the next best place is to start going to meetups, dev meetups, anywhere you go, there's always gonna be teachers and students. There gonna be people who are in their careers, who are trying to pay it forward and, and give, you know, give back to the community.

And there's gonna be people who are there trying to learn from the community. So that's another great resource to, uh, find mentorship. 10 Developers of all skill levels benefit from this 100% every skill level.

If you're a senior engineer, you should be finding a mentor who's someone who's a staff architect, however, you know, whatever the next level is at your company. Um, or you could be doing, like having, being mentored by an engineering manager if you think you want to go into management. If so, every le every step of your career.

Right now I'm in, I'm a senior developer advocate and I have an active mentor, someone who's not at my company, someone that I've worked with in the past. And I said, and, and I respected that. I've seen what they've done.

I said, I'm still asking. I still have questions. I'm still learning.

Will you teach me? Um, and so I'm always on that, on that note, I'm also always actively looking for people to mentor because I think it's, it's just such a skill that, and so beneficial to everybody. I think that's really good that like, we're still learning Always.

I mean, my parents were teachers. Um, so I grew up in an educator's home and life is, my dad always told me, life is the life is your classroom, or the world is your classroom life is your teacher. And so I take that into everything.

Always be learning. There's always something someone, it doesn't matter who you are, even if I'm a junior, if, if I'm a senior engineer, or when I was a senior engineer, for instance, I learned from my junior engineers on a regular basis. They had life experiences that I didn't have.

And so they would approach problems in novel ways that I didn't, I didn't look at. Um, so it, it, like I said, you're, I'm always learning. There's always, there's always something to learn from somebody else.

So you kind of combined your technology passions and like teaching. Yes, absolutely. Have you always been passionate about technology?

Yes. Um, I, I wish I was a little bit more passionate earlier on, uh, in my career. So my career path was a little different.

Coming into tech, I spent, uh, 15 years in construction, in transportation logistics. So I was not doing tech. Um, when I was a kid, my, I was always been big into video games.

I take my computer apart. I would try to do soldering, I would do all these things. Um, my dad had tried to get me into doing a CS degree when I was in college, and I said, no, I wish I had.

Um, but uh, a few years back I decided to go into, go back to school and become a software engineer. And at that point I started to really, so I was able to combine my love of teaching into a passion of, into the passion that they now have, or a continued growth of passion into technology. What do you do today as a job?

I'm a senior developer advocate, which means I get to, I get to come to conferences, talk. Uh, I, in this case, I get to speak at conferences, talk about my experiences, share at a, on a larger scale, uh, mentor from the podium. So it's still related to mentoring.

Yes, I still, I take every one, every time I, every time I speak, um, whether it's on stage at a conference or whether it's at within a demo at at work, um, or whatever, I try to instill some type of mentorship in there. Sometimes it, I, I just, I'm always a teacher. I'm always gonna be a teacher.

Uh, so it kind of, it kind of fits in. Um, will you write your demos for work? Like is there some form of mentorship in that?

Yeah, so when I'm demoing, I also look at it. I was, I worked on a product, uh, on a product team that built an ai, uh, assistant that said a postman. And at that point I was also having to teach mentor sales, the customer service department, like the customer success teams.

Uh, the rest of the field team, uh, talked to Derel at the time I was, I was demoing these new products to the rest of the organization and I had to be ready to answer all of their questions. So that was a really perfect, like, so even those demos are a perfect opportunity to mentor and talk to others. I think that's interesting how mentorships really ex extend everywhere.

Yeah, I find it, I find mentorship, again, key to my success, key to anyone is who's coming into this industry key, to anyone who's, I mean, doesn't even have to be in tech. Find someone who's better at you in some way and ask to have them mentor you. That's how you'll learn.

There are, you know, in my, in my, the way I look at it, there's no stupid questions. That's a very teacher mentor type of thing to say, but I don't find that there are any stupid questions out there. You just have to find someone who's willing to answer those questions for you.

That's really inspirational. Thank you. So thank you today, Sterling.

It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.