Topic: Mentorship

A senior engineer stepped into a first-time lead role and discovered that the real shock was not fewer hours of coding. It was realizing that a full day could be spent reviewing, mentoring, estimating, and unblocking, yet still feel invisible because the work had shifted from personal output to other people’s growth.

This piece is about that shift: what I had to trade when speed stopped being my main source of value, and why the manager side of the role turned out to be harder than I expected. It is also about what makes that transition more complicated in an AI-heavy code review culture, where code can look polished long before the underlying fundamentals are solid.

It began as a small experiment to bring engineers back into contact with each other. Junior developers paired with mentors from different teams, learning how the company really worked instead of just their own corner of it.

No formal training, just regular conversations that built trust, context, and confidence. Over time, those early pairs shaped a quiet tradition.

Mentees became mentors. The bridges stayed.