Mentoring on Talent QL's Pipeline Bootcamp
Retrospective on 8 months with my first cohort
I got introduced to Jerry and his team via MentorCruise. Pipeline hosts several tracks similar to roadmap.sh in up-skilling engineers with 3-5 YOE. Targets vary from getting a better job, moving or relocating to a FAANG-friendly location or getting promoted. We got to experience all of these throughout my 8 months with them.
We had the graduation call last week. I’m sharing my findings with you.
Life is messy
It took me a while to learn from the students all the novel complexities of being a software engineer in Nigeria:
Discrimination
Often balancing two jobs
Unreliable power grids
VISA issues
Pricing parity problems with western conferences and classes
It started dawning on me while cheaper talent-building options like Udemy and free blogs were popular.
Focus on Soft Skills and DevOps
I was pleasantly surprised by the emphasis on communication and developer experience. Pipeline has a heavy focus on recruiting and traditional FAANG-level methods to showing capabilities. It definitely shows on the focus of out-of-the-box negotiation strategies and leetcode exercises.
My part as their mentor began with simple objective-setting to polish up their identity, self-worth, confidence levels along with their CV and public profiles. What followed was a mix of training, mentoring and coaching.
Don’t Accumulate Knowledge— Apply it!
I made it quite clear that we’re not going to spend time learning anything they wouldn’t apply. So the initial new knowledge was focused on DDD and TDD. As I saw it wasn’t their priority, we shifted to project planning and negotiating tactics. That hit home!
How to negotiate salaries
Holding your calm on interviews
Handling a difficult estimation conversation
These topics quickly replaced the more traditional, obvious choices. It’s not that TDD and DDD wasn’t useful to them — it’s that they lacked the authority or inspiration to apply it with their current team, so we focused on finding a better one / or getting promoted.
Imposter Syndrome is Everywhere
Many struggled. In that state it’s easy to make the assumption that everyone else is FAANG-level material and they are just barely understanding basics. But that’s not the case. As we saw during our regular meetings and later on in the capstone project it was apparent that everyone on the program had real human problems to deal with.
Health, family issues, children, politics.
Balancing all that is part of the job and we course-corrected regularly and quickly. Before Christmas we set out large step to be done before new year’s eve to set them on a big-goal north star trajectory!
That got them really busy — more interviews, successful promotions, more responsibility. After 3 months the real world impact started rolling in already. And we were only halfway through.
Presentation Matters, Plan the Release
The capstone projects are where the team really got together. By far the most praised and well-received part of the bootcamp was also the most stressful one. Even though we knew it was role played, everyone took it very seriously and quickly the same inter-team communication challenges arose as on a real project.
Ultimately most teams struggled with two sides of the same problem:
Not being finished on the deadline, being ashamed to demo in postman
Cutting so much scope to finish on the deadline they thought it wasn’t good enough to fake everything
Sound familiar?
This was the actual lesson! We tend to over-estimate our ability to deliver and under-estimate our capability to deal with unknowns. It’s very unintuitive and I was amazed by the a-ha moments of many students coming to this same realisation in a safe, trusting environment!
They got an experience that will shape their careers and has boosted their confidence and skills. In less than a year!
Real projects are like this as well. It comes down to dealing with the frustration of doing it anyway.
Iterate and adapt.
Plan your presentation. Plan your release. Then do it. Ideally without spending much of the deadline budget. This is always a hard lesson. And even though everyone knew it was a fake project, the emotions were real and they couldn’t resist it.
I’m very grateful for this opportunity. Thank you to MentorCruise and Talent QL. Looking forward to the next cohort in September!