Most senior developers ration mentoring against the clock. The default position is “I’d love to help, but my calendar is full” or “let’s chat once you become a paying client.” I understand the math. I do something different anyway.
What I do
- Take mentoring calls from people I don’t know who reach out genuinely. The bar is “they want to improve their craft and they’re putting in the work” — not “they could become a client.”
- Prioritise at-risk and remote community members. People without a senior dev at the next desk are the ones the open mentoring channel exists for.
- Answer community questions in public — WordPress.org forums, GitHub issues, Slack groups — so the answer helps everyone, not just the asker.
- Treat the time as real time, not interstitial filler between paid work. If I commit to a call, the call gets prepared for.
- Show up consistently. The hardest part of mentoring isn’t the first conversation; it’s the eighth one, when calendar pressure rises and nothing’s stopping you from cancelling.
What I decline
- “Mentorship” framed as networking. Mentoring is teaching; networking is trading. They’re different jobs.
- Time-gated mentoring, premium-tier-only access, or “book a coaching slot for $X.” That’s selling, not mentoring.
- Mentoring relationships that quietly become unpaid consulting. If the conversation is about your client’s project rather than your craft, we’re past mentoring and into work — that needs a different agreement.
- Vague “I’d love to pick your brain” requests with no specific question or context. The asymmetric ones drain mentors and produce nothing for the asker either. Come with a real question.
Why this is the position
Technology can be a lever for people who have less of everything else. Code is one of the few skill sets where geography, age, and starting circumstances don’t determine the ceiling — given access to the right help at the right moments. The “right help at the right moments” is mentoring. Most of it doesn’t exist for the people who need it most because the senior developers in their orbit are behind a paywall, swamped with their own work, or in a different time zone.
I had mentors. Not many, not constantly, but a handful of people who answered the question I needed answered when I needed it answered. That changed what I could build and what I could do for a living. The ledger I owe isn’t to those individual mentors — they didn’t ask for repayment. It’s to the next generation of the same kind of person.
The cost is real. Hours that could have been billable, sometimes attention I could have been spending on my own work. The return isn’t financial, and that’s a feature of the position, not a bug. If I only mentored when it converted to revenue, I’d be running a sales funnel with a friendly face on it. That’s the opposite of what mentoring is for.
If you’re someone who wants to improve the world through code, especially from a remote or at-risk position, send me a real question on LinkedIn. I read every DM.
If this is you: send a real question via LinkedIn. Not “let’s connect.” A specific problem you’re stuck on, what you’ve already tried, and what you’re trying to learn. That gets a real answer.
See also
- The next developer who opens my code is in a teaching moment. The same principle of leaving things better than you found them, applied to code instead of people.
- I teach you how I built it. That's part of the build.. On the teaching that happens inside paid engagements.
- What 15 WordCamp Talks Taught Me About WordPress Careers. The longer-form piece on mentoring inside community work.
