Whatever your job, mentoring is your job – and the one that matters most

Opinion When I started coding for a living 43 years ago, I didn't know shit from Shinola. I'd written a lot of BASIC, some Z80 assembler, and knew my way around floppy drives and a disk operating system. I knew nothing at all about how to operate as a junior engineer in a professional environment.

I lucked out. My two "seniors" on that first job out of university – John and Ethan – took me under their respective wings. John knew everything about bit-banging the 8085 CPUs we programmed; Ethan had more systems experience – he could make CP/M sing with BIOS calls. I needed the experience of both, and they shared it freely.

A good mentor knows when to take the training wheels off the bike

In the two years I had that job, I made a fair few mistakes but learned the essentials of software engineering as a ...