How I Used the Career Triforce to Change my Job

When I was leaving Microsoft, on my last day, I got a lot of questions around why I was leaving. I was a lynch pin of sorts in the team. I was positioned very well to get impactful work. Highly networked. Very happy with my day to day. Reporting to one of the best managers/mentors on the planet.

I was on a career trajectory for Microsoft that was almost unreal. Averaging better than a promotion every 2 years with no slow down just because I was cross bands eventually ending up at the top of the Principal ladder. Compensation was great when compared relatively across other MS employees (will not be discussing this further). Everything seemed to be going amazingly well.

What did I say to everyone? Well, I said there are three areas (these are not my own, but taken from a book on career advice that I found exceptionally relevant) on which you should judge your current career. You should start by looking at your Job. Do you love it? Are you able to make an impact? Are you passionate about what you are doing? All off my answers here would be positive. The first part of my TriForce is complete

Next you look at your Manager. This is the singular individual who has the most control over your happiness and your career path in most companies. Ask yourself questions like, are you aligned with your boss? Does your support you when you are about to fail? Does your boss accentuate your good qualities and help you improve on your bad qualities? Can your boss act as your manager, your friend, a leader and a mentor? Well, #FML, it turns out I just found the second part of my TriForce.

Lastly I said you look at your Team. For me, at my level this meant looking at my immediate team, the entire Edge WPT team and then finally up to the Windows organization as a whole. Those are the scales at which I had impact at Microsoft. When looking at all levels of the team you ask questions like, do I like working with these people? Are the politics manageable or are they over the top? Does the team exercise trust? Does the team exercise transparency? As I worked from my local team up to Windows the third component in my TriForce starts to crack a little bit, maybe it has a little bit less luster.

However, when I consider the most stress I faced while making my decision to change jobs, it came down to the people. I loved the people and I felt like we created an almost extended family like support system for one another. I wasn't concerned about my projects that wouldn't get done if I left. Instead I was worried about the people that I worked with on a daily basis that I could see growing and becoming amazing engineers in their own rights. I was worried there wouldn't be enough people left infusing positive energy into the team on a daily basis to keep the morale up. I was worried that I was failing my team by leaving. That's when you realize, yeah, you have a great team. There may be some scuffs on that TriForce shard, but its still shining just as brightly as the other 2. My TriForce was complete.

My Answer

Okay, so if I already had the TriForce what kind of answer could I give everyone then? Why was I leaving? This is when I learned something that I had learned earlier in my career, but it took another 11 and a half years to discover it again. Once you've built a TriForce there isn't as much exponential growth in your future and mostly you just end up making incremental improvements. You spend more time doing the things you know, rather than learning new things. Your awesomeness starts to atrophy. You rarely feel the stress of a complicated and new situation. You rarely push your boundaries.

That isn't to say there aren't still moments like that. There certainly are. They just aren't as often and so growth tends to become linear and plateau increasingly frequently.

You also don't know if you have the skills to build another TriForce. I spend a lot of time mentoring and I often reach out for new mentees. My dream is that they too can achieve their TriForce and that I'm an enabler for that. I provide experience and strategies for working with difficult situations and to figure out why some aspect of their career is not shining or working well with the rest. Are my recommendations good? Do I have enough experience to offer the types of career advice that they need? If I put myself in their shoes, with their knowledge, and took on their risk would I be able to replicate my experience?

That is an important question for me. Doing something once can be dumb luck. It doesn't mean you can make it happen. It means it happened and perhaps it has something to do with you. But perhaps you are unaware of the actual forces of nature that brought it into being and it turns out it had nothing to do with you. That is a scary thought. Am I successful because of me? Or am I successful because of a random set of circumstances that I only manipulated superficially.

This led me to my answer to the team, paraphrasing a bit I finally said, "When you make a career change you should look at your job, boss and team. If they are all great then you are probably on the right track. When I look at myself, I have a TriForce in these three areas. Everything is amazing. So I had to use other measures to figure out my future. Specifically to follow my passions in VR and to see if I can build my second TriForce."

Maybe everyone thinks that is bullshit and will point to other factors in my decision making. I had a lot. Compensation, family, location and friends were all additional complications. However, I can say after tons of cross comparison Excel tables, almost everything zero'ed out between Oculus and Microsoft. I was only left with a very real and pressing question, one that Brendan Iribe asked me during my process. Do you want to think about VR all day, every day? That was his pitch to me. An offer to work on a technology that would change the future with all of my insight and passion. And when my answer to that simpler question is, "Fuck Yeah!" you can see how my explanation to my former team was given in honesty.

Passion

Passion isn't on the TriForce, but it is part of how you feel about your Job, how you are supported by your Boss (does he let you run with your wacky ideas?) and how your Team adapts to a changing society and marketplace. That makes it is an integral component in all of them. When you are passionate you'll find that you can't sleep because you are still solving problems. You spring out of bed every morning to rush to work. You let everyone know what you are working on and why they should care. You see clearly how what you are doing is going to change the future, improve lives, connect you more closely to your friends/family and make the world a better place for everyone to live.

When I saw the opportunity to lend my passion and devote all of my ability to launching the VR revolution I couldn't pass it up. VR has to potential to change the way that we think about education, jobs and entertainment. It literally allows us to redefine space itself and transform a living room into an anything room. I didn't jump ship to VR in the beginning because my expertise wasn't needed yet. But now is the time to scale and build platforms for VR that extend to millions. This is where I thrive as a developer. This is where the web thrives as a platform for scale and accessibility. This is the time to deeply investment my time and effort and build my second career TriForce. With news like the HTC VR alliance offering 10 billion in VC capital to development of VR content and experiences, I think I'm in good company thinking this way.

My Final Advice

Most people in their careers I find are working on some aspect of building their TriForce, probably for the first time. I know because I mentor some amazing developers and almost always they have some sort of hang-up in one of these areas and they haven't yet figured out how to completely self-diagnose themselves when things are going wrong.

For this reason I think evaluating your job, boss and team is a great way for you to figure out two things. For instance, do you need to improve something in your current career in order to elevate yourself to the next level. You may find that your job sucks for some reason, but it is within your control to make it not suck. You should do that. The easiest thing to change is yourself.

If you evaluate these and find that there are things outside of your control that you don't see are going to change then you can use it as a way to figure out how you are going to change your career. Not everything is within your control and often times your happiness or passion requires an environmental change. Perhaps your current job would get you there, but in a time period that is longer than you would like. I always recommended being open and honest during this period just in case you've misread your situation. If you did, then making your situation apparent to your team can sometimes result in the change that you were going to switch jobs for.

If you are sitting on your TriForce though and you are happy with all three you shouldn't close your eyes off to the opportunities that might present themselves. Maintain your marketability and interview skills. From time to time, reach out and do an interview or two and see what else is available both in terms of unique job roles, but also life changing compensation. When an opportunity comes along and you do have to make the big decision, know that it will be stressful. Then calm down, evaluate everything objectively and if it looks like another opportunity to build your next TriForce then perhaps you should go for it!

Looking to 2016 with New Years Resolutions that Stick!

I can't believe its already 2 weeks into the New Year and I'm just settling on my resolutions. It isn't that they haven't been done, but I've been trying quite hard to marry them with the mentoring recommendations that I supply to people throughout the year. After all, how can I give people advice on how to achieve their goals when I myself am not following and helping to prove out the advice!

The advice I tend to give comes down to very basic time management. You have 168 hours in a week, 1/3rd of which is taken up by sleep and another quarter which is taken up by work. If you consider your time at work well spent and accomplished, then you are left with approximately two more work like things that you can deal with and make significant progress on. You'll also find that the majority of the time you can commit is on the weekends. The following graphs hopefully break this down by showing an average day, a 5 day work week and finally a breakdown with the weekends included. If your week doesn't look like this, great, build your own graphs for your commitments and you'll likely find a variation of the "Big 3" pattern falls out.

Looking at this graph you clearly can't see any way for 2 things to compete with work. We have a decent sized commute, a big chunk of sleep, a big chunk of work with little buffer. That buffer is your family time, exercise, decompression, etc... You have to figure out how to make functional for you to fit in time for your big accomplishments since it does represent a hefty chunk of your overall weekly buffer. Here is the same graph, but expanded to show the 5 day work week.

That buffer has now grown to 20 hours. This is now competitive with the 40 hours we spend at work assuming that the 20 hours is very focused. We are constantly bombarded with interruptions at work that we can avoid when working on our own projects during our buffer time. But we can do even better. Let's grow the buffer by adding in our weekend time.

We now have 50 hours (55 if you take away your fun time, which I consider playing games or watching movies or something like that). You could do one HUGE thing in that time or you could split the time and do 2 big things. I like to split this down into 40 (work), 30 (a big project), 20 (smaller projects). As an example, blogging on the weekends I roll up into my social, networking and mentoring projects which I try to fit into about 20 hours a week.

Some people will point out that you don't need 20 hours to accomplish something. That 20 hours a week for many months is a huge time sink. Remember I'm comparing the accomplishments you want to achieve to something akin to your work. Your work fuels your entire lifestyle and is hopefully something you really enjoy doing. I'm not preaching on how to be a better multi-tasker, I'm instead coaching on how to increase the probability of achieving a goal.

One more realization is that work is a constant. Its something you show up to 48+ weeks out of the year. Not every accomplishment will take a year of your time. I'm focusing you on achieving 2 additional goals AT A TIME since its better to have a 2 accomplished goals after 3 months with 6 more to go than coming up on the end of the year and trying to land 8 that you spread too thin. This means that you'll schedule more than 2 goals for the year and that each goal will probably have a duration less than a year in length. Examples might be buying a house or committing yourself for 3 months to a sports team in the spring.

This provides the frame of reference for understanding my resolutions breakdown.

My Resolutions

I'm choosing Health and Exercise, Work and Social Networking as my big 3 commitments for the year. Within these I have some breakdowns or sub-goals that make up the overall commitment. I want to go a step further though and make sure I haven't overbooked myself, that my goals are able to be accomplished. Given the 50 hour week buffer I should be able further break that down.

I also have some personal goals that have very fixed time constraints as well as some educational goals to keep my mind focused and fresh. Welcome to my 2016 New Years Resolutions!

• Work
• Make Significant Design and Implementation Progress on an HTML 5 Event Loop for EdgeHTML - See my blog on Promises.
• Deep Dive into Telemetry Collection and Visualization for Web Browsers - See my progress in my blog on API Telemetry.
• Accelerate the Identification and Removal of Legacy Code in EdgeHTML
• Contribute 3 Articles to the IE Team Blog
• Make Significant Contributions to WebVR and VR for the Web in general - See my thoughts in my blog on our WebVR Hackathon.
• Health and Exercise
• Take Zuckerberg's 365 Mile Running Challenge
• Integrate Swimming Once a Week
• Stair Climbing 100 Floors Weekly
• Do 1 Stair Climbing Event (Big Climb?)
• Overall Goal of 6 Hours of Exercise per Week
• Low Cholesterol Diet (100mg daily)
• Social, Networking, Blogging, Mentorship
• Achieve my Goals for Mentoring Diversity
• Establish Consistent Mentors for Myself (Shooting for 4)
• Mentor More Startup Entrepreneurs (Shooting for 3)
• Do One Seattle Meetup per Month (JS, Indie Game Devs, etc...)
• Do One Hackathon Quarterly (Ludum Dare?)
• Try to Blog Once per Week (Consistency is King!)
• Try to Kick Off One HTML 5 Focused Blog (Variety)
• Maybe Make it a Video Streaming Channel?

Just because those are my 3 major areas doesn't make the next set of personal and educational goals any less important. It just means that the above 3 will trump many other things and that their activation energy is higher. I want to increase my changes of being successful and time (combined with effort) is a surefire way of doing that. Here are my more constrained resolutions!

• Personal Goals
• My Wife and I will Buy our Next House
• Plan and Take our Japan Trip
• Spend a Week and Visit New York!
• Education
• Natural Language Study through Duo Lingo and Other Gamification Based Applications
• Read 1 Fiction and 1 Non-Fiction Book per Month and set up a Book List Page
• Take a Data Science Course through Coursera or Udacity
• Learn the R Programming Language

This is a mostly complete list of my publicly shareable goals. I still value some level of privacy so I can't be completely transparent. Keep that in mind, since you'll see me leaving some buffer in my year and will probably wonder, "What is he going to do with that?". Mostly the answer is, account for all of my mistakes, but some of it will be used for things I'm unable to share at this time.

Broad Strokes

To take a first stab, try to see what it looks like to fit your goals into a single weeks buffer. This is not what your final scheduling would look like, but it will help to give you an understanding of whether or not you might be over budgeted. It also helps you to realize what is the relative cost of this commitment versus your already existing sleep, food and work. If this is your first time breaking things down this way it will be enlightening. Here is my basic breakdown of the 50 hour budget based on overall goals (no sub-goal breakdown).

This is a moment to validate the data. For instance, is 6 hours a week proper for exercise? What about 5 hours for reading? I've added in 8 hours each weekend for games, television, hiking, etc... (though hiking may at some point overlap with my exercise goals instead ;-) To me the initial data looks pretty good and I have a nice buffer of 15 hours, or 30% of my original buffer time. This gives me a lot of flexibility. Once you are happy with your weekly breakdown, just scale it up to a full year.

Now is the opportunity to see if anything leaps out as absurd. For instance, does 250 hours of reading allow us to meet our goal? We want to read 24 books, at 10 hours average per book (I read big, technical books :-) then we can do 25. Okay, so those numbers hold water. Language learning might be a bit high, since it seems like more than I spent in high school learning Spanish. Then again, I want to kick my younger self's butt, so that seems pretty solid too.

These are all yearly goals for me. Things I'm going to continue doing throughout and not things that will be done in say 3 months and then replaced. So overall the numbers here look good. This also accounts for all but my personal goals around travel and a house purchase, which should easily fit blocks like More Fun (if buying a house can be considered fun) or the rather large 750 hour buffer.

From here I like to do one more breakdown, which I won't graph, but I'll fit it into a table instead. What if we took the sub-goals, decided on some metric and then computed our accomplishment? We could then compare that against the accomplishment we want to achieve. I'll do one example and then just leave you with the chart.

Let's take the 365 Mile Challenge from Zuckerberg. If I assume that I run 6mi/h on average and I have 300 hours of exercise available to me, then I end up running 1800 miles. That is way further than I need to go. In fact it is ~5x farther. Some more math tells me that I need to run 1 mile per day, 7 miles per week. That means I need a bit more than 1 hour (1 hour and 10 minutes) each week of running to achieve the goal. Using these figures I can then layer in swimming (1 hour weekly) and stairs (maybe 2 hours weekly) and determine that I'm well buffered for exercise and in fact that is good. I have time to stretch ;-) Let's see how this pans out for everything that isn't Work.

Resolutions	Metrics	Totals	Achievements
Exercise	300		Exercise is well buffered!
Miles\h	6	1800	~ 5x the 365 Challenge
Swims	1	300	~ 6x the swims needed
Stairs\h	100	30000	~ 300 Empire State Buildings
Reading	250		Reading is very tight
Books\h	0.1	25	~ 10/h book average
Language	300		Language is extremely well buffered!
Duo Lingo Lessons\h	4	1200	~ 3 Languages at 1200-1800 words
Social	500		Social is potentially overbooked
Blogs per Hour	0.25	125	~ 2.25 times goal of 1 per week!
Mentor Sessions/h	1	300	~ 2/wk for a 100 sessions target
Hours per Hackathon	32	15.625	~ 4/yr is the target
Hours per Meetup	4	125	~ 12/yr is target

There are some fun metrics in here. For instance, 300 Empire state buildings would be climbed over the course of 100 hours. Its okay since I'll be splitting that 6 hours of time between several different exercise resolutions. It does tell me that even once I break it down I'll be doing a lot of each of those. Which is good! I want to maximize my chances of success in my major goals. Health is an issue for me at this time and so to get in better health you have to not just do what an average, healthier person would do. You have to do a bit more, take a bit more time, avoid injury and build a sustainable plan.

At this level I start to show weakness in my initial plans as well. Look at my language learning. I doubt that I'll learn 3 languages in one year, but based on the lessons present in a Duo Lingo course, I would end up maybe doing a language every 4 months. That might mean that I can manage that goal more carefully, reduce the time and assign to somewhere else. It may also mean that I'm underestimating the relative complexity of the lessons so its better to look at this after 1, 2, and 3 months and see how things are going and adapt as appropriate.

We also see that Social is where I'm both putting a lot of my time, but its potentially still not enough. I have to ask myself, am I doing too much? Or do I need to allocate more time. Remember this is one of my major 3 commitments and that education was not. I am very likely to focus more time and more energy on this area. It is also one of the most complicated areas (it comprises many components and sub-goals) and so my estimates are more likely to be incorrect and there are things that I'm likely not accounting for. I'll certainly be reviewing this one very closely to see how I'm able to stick to the commitments I laid forth.

Conclusion

If you can take away one bit of information in this article, please take away the concept of the "Big 3". If you want to really make a dent in something you have to treat it with the same level of priority as you do your job or career. That commitment will present itself in both time, effort and accountability. You want to over buffer and leave yourself room to succeed. Don't expect that because this is something you are driven to do that it'll be any easier.

When fitting your resolutions into your schedule always use "primary time" and not "overlapped time". You could listen to books on your drive for instance and try to "double up", but you are really only cheating yourself. You should value focused and committed time over all else. You are free to double up, overlap and otherwise multi-task. Just don't do it for the things you want to make huge improvements on.

Simple math is often the best math. You can gain many insights with just a few sums and extrapolating over time. This kind of math is most often defeated by poor estimates but poor estimates can be countered by sufficient buffer.

Once you have a basic plan in place, set up time to retrospect and make sure your estimates were accurate. Time trumps all and the more time you have available to you the easier it is to correct a mistake. If you are off in the first month but can average the mistake over 11 months that is much better than figuring out in December that your 40 hour commitment is actually 80.

Finally, make plans to be done. If you have 8 accomplishments you want over the course of the year it is better to bank a couple in the early months than to try to sprint at the end to finish all 8. This is a classic multi-tasking mistake that people make once they become comfortable with their plan and estimates. Its probably the number one cause in software engineering when a features misses the check-in deadlines by just a couple of days. Buffers are built into plans so you finish early, not so that you can consume the buffer up front and then fit the last 2 days of programming into the last 2 days of the milestone. It almost never works out!

I'm putting it all out there for you guys, so if you see me slacking off let me know. There is no greater motivator for performance than a critical audience. I'm quite happy this year to have this set of goals, of varying diversity and to have confidence that I can achieve them all.

Retrospective: 2015 as a Tech and Career Mentor

2015 was a pretty great year mentoring for me. After several years of offering advice to others, I now have a small, consistent group of individuals that I work with. Each in a different way, important to them, but probably more important to me.

My Background and Thoughts On Mentoring

I generally mentor people at Microsoft who are experiencing some issue in their career growth. Sometimes the issues are things they can change, sometimes the environment needs to change, sometimes it is technical, sometimes it relates to missing skill-sets and sometimes its personal issues. No matter what the cause, as an external observer, I can either directly help them or I can find someone else who can. I can be supportive, uplifting or give them the hard talk about something they need to change. Whatever they need. As a mentor I'm adaptable to their situation.

Most of my mentoring sessions consist of drawing parallels between road-blocks that I've faced and how I overcame them. By explaining through a real scenario it usually becomes much clearer to others that they have options. More increasingly though I find that my experiences aren't the same as theirs. This was a great mentoring realization for me, people have unique problems, they have unique strengths and weaknesses. My "solution" isn't their "solution". Instead I need to offer many viewpoints and using the combined experiences of all of my mentees, not just my own experiences. Intelligent people tend to solve their own problems once they start to realize how many options they have. Persistent problems tend to remain so long as your options are limited.

Helping someone find their options isn't limited to those with wisdom and experience either. This is my pitch to those who think they are too young mentor others. Mentoring is just as much about listening, learning, problem solving and being supportive as it is about learning purely from experience. If you are giving someone the solutions to their problems, it isn't really a mentoring session anymore. You are trying to make them better, help them to find their own solutions, not demonstrate how easily and intelligently you could resolve their issue.

Mentoring doesn't have to be formal. It could be one friend to another. It doesn't have to be long or short. A single meeting or many years worth of them, both outcomes are acceptable. It could be a regular weekly meeting or it could be a couple of random days in the year. It doesn't have to be scheduled at all, for instance, getting feedback on a potentially career limiting email from your mentor can often be the difference between success and failure.

We need more mentors thinking about diversity. Rico Mariani recently started an inspiring series of thoughts and threads (well more than that, he started a scholarship) focused on women in tech. He immediately reached out to everyone on his team and made it very clear, minorities in tech, regardless of which minority, need equal opportunities and access to strong mentors. So I'm going to do some more thinking on this. I think it is very hard for someone to reach out and accept mentoring and the bigger the differences which exist (level, race, gender, social status, personalities) the harder it is for someone to take that first step. Its probably time to reach out to potential mentees, a lot more often, and accept the rejections in favor of helping the diversity imbalances.

My Mentees for 2015

This won't focus solely on 2015, since one of my most important roles in mentoring occurred during 2014 just following the large Microsoft lay-offs. My list of mentees (anonymous) and how we spend our time.

1. The Entrepreneur - I once owned my own company and was independently successful for a few years during my 20's. This experience taught me quite a bit. One of my mentees is at a point in his life where he wants to develop a small company for himself and so we have sessions on how to transition from your day job to being a founder.
2. The Classic - Before the Microsoft mentoring site went down I got my last mentee referral for what would become my most normal mentoring setup. We meet on his schedule and the topics are around how to manage his career development, communications, timing and positioning. Sorry, I'll expand more on that in a bit ;-)
3. The Switcher - Within the past few months I've started working with someone who is unhappy in their position on their current team. They had already made a decision that improving their situation was not the right move, that they needed a change. For this person, I'm helping them improve their technical interviewing skills.
4. The LayOffs - When the large scale Microsoft lay-offs happened I realized quickly that many intelligent and capable people were going to start having a very hard time in the job market. It is easy to have your skills atrophy when you work in a mature company like Microsoft. For this group, I got to learn the challenges of mentoring in a group setting.
5. The Boxer - Everyone needs change and growth opportunities. This person had been working in the same area for too long and was feeling constrained, as if they had been put in a box for safe keeping. When in this position, having options and knowing what you can and should be able to ask for to improve your situation is key.

With the exception of the group training I did when the lay-offs occurred, my diversity scorecard has me gender biased (zero female mentees) but doing okay otherwise (I have mentees of many races, though they are all male). During the lay-offs, I was able to help multiple female engineers reset their skills and I'm happy that a majority of them were able to quickly find a position that was as good or better than what they left.

You Get More than you Give

My mentees are consistently conscious of my time. They don't want to waste it, since they view my time as important, and they view me as someone who maximizes the value of my own time. Guess what, they are right! I do value my own time and I can say hands down the time I spend mentoring is far more important than anything else I could be doing. So the secret to mentoring is that you spend time doing it, its that you can help yourself and others at the same time, in ways that will help you in the future.

After all, how do you become better at anything? You PRACTICE it. Mentoring gives you the opportunity to be a great listener and a strong communicator. It helps you to organize your experiences and arguments through self-reflection that you are able to share with someone else. Your mentee can sometimes reverse the experience on you and potentially point out something you missed when you dealt with a situation that you are using as an example. These moments, for me, have always led to improvements in my own career.

Your mentees will also have experiences that differ from your own. This will help you increase your own understanding of diversity and help provide you with insights to improve how you integrate and communicate with your co-workers. Perhaps a certain cultural bias prevents someone from speaking up, and you are able to experience this through your mentee, then it can make you more sensitive to this issue.

The last bit for me is around building your moral standards. If I'm not helping people, I'm not happy. There is a certain amount of human interaction and empathy that goes into the entire process that leaves me feeling like I've done something, bigger than myself. I've reached out and helped someone else. You can get this many ways, through teaching, mentoring or volunteering, so I challenge you to do all 3 to maximize your own benefits ;-)

Reaching Out

You've read everything above and you are thinking, "Sign me up!" So how do you start? I don't have 40 years of experience doing this, but I do have enough to know one thing. Not everyone realizes they need a mentor and pointing it out often isn't enough to convince them. Mentoring is a two-way street and even though I have time to give my advice it doesn't mean that others have the time to hear it. It is an exceptional case when someone walks up to you and ASKS you to mentor them. This almost never happens. 

So you have to put yourself out there and let people know you are ready to help. When approaching a new mentee with an offer, do so privately. Not everyone sees having mentors as a strength and some see it as a sign of weakness. A powerful mentor relationship can also be seen as a threat or even favoritism. This is normally irrational and unhealthy thoughts by others but it is something to be aware of.

By the numbers, the amount of people that I will approach is quite small. I'm evaluating a lot of different outcomes and consequences. As a mentor I should do a MUCH better job of approaching people. 

Once approached, the acceptance rate is probably 50/50. So be prepared to be rejected. This is key, never take someone else's rejection of your mentoring offer as anything against you. There are a lot of factors they are evaluating as well, including whether or not they even feel comfortable talking to you. They may not see you as a mentor at all. This is normal. When you get a rejection, kindly let them know that you are available in the future if things change, and move on.

Even out of those who accept, there is a likelihood you will never have your first mentoring session. If you do, there is a high likelihood it will be your last or next to last. Being mentored is not for everyone and maybe the session made them feel awkward. I bet psychologists have a similar track record with new clients. Also, not every problem is one to be fixed. Your mentee may find that it isn't the right time for them to think about and correct the issues impacting them. This is especially true in long term career mentoring.

Once you've gotten started be prepared to adapt yourself to many different types of people and expectations. If they want you to set up a schedule and manage it, then do that. Otherwise, if they want to set it up instead, then let them do that. The majority of the improvement they make will be when they are not interacting directly with you, so figure out how to follow up with them. If they like goals, set them up. The more you mentor the more you'll figure this out, but being prepared will hopefully your first few mentoring encounters much more fruitful.

If in doubt, get a mentor yourself and ask them about mentoring. Its the ultimate mentoring meta ;-)

Diversifying

Diversifying your mentees can be extremely difficult. First, people are more comfortable around those more like them. For this reason, in a work environment, people of similar ethnic backgrounds are likely to stick together. When a team has good diversity this doesn't happen as much, but then the team itself can stick together and becomes a blocker for technical diversity. Since minorities, by definition, are fewer within the groups, trying to find a mentor that matches your minority can be hard.

This leaves our minority populations in tech with a hard problem. First, they can't find high level mentors within their own minority. Second, they may find it hard or challenging to find high level mentors at all. This all assumes that they reach out. If they don't then its perhaps more unlikely that an appropriate mentor would not find them.

This type of diversity bias is what we have to overcome. It isn't really fixed by taking a "fair" approach to the problem. You can't sit back, and expect the odds to play themselves out here. While you may think that by accepting anyone and everyone you'll achieve diversity, you won't. You have to break the "fairness" and make a point of being unfair in your selection of mentees and how you reach out. Make a point of prioritizing for ethnic and gender diversity when you fill up your time initially and then worry about filling out the majority slots later. Trust me, they won't be nearly as hard to fill.

For my part, I'm going to commit to filling out my diversity card in the upcoming year of 2016. I've already tweeted that I have some mentoring capacity. I'm reserving that space for women and other minorities in tech. I will be proactive and start reaching out to potential mentees and work with other mentors in my network in case they know of people actively looking. I am going to increase my efforts towards STEM education for minorities though I don't yet have a plan for how I'm going to do that. If anyone has ideas let me know ;-) I'll make sure to be more vocal about my efforts as well in case it can inspire or inform others. Bringing awareness is a key step in solving any problem.

Finally a challenge to all you would be mentors. If you aren't sure, and you want to talk to someone about becoming a mentor, I hear you can call anyone on this thing called the Internet. I'd be happy to talk with you about my experiences and answer any questions you might have before you get started.