The Catch Block #49 - Mentors, Isolation, Okta, and Generics

In this edition of The Catch Block, let's continue our Burnout Series by discussing two more factors that contribute to burnout among developers: poor mentorship, and isolation.

Burnout Cause #2 - Poor (or Nonexistent) Mentorship

A poor mentor, or a lack of quality mentorship, causes burnout in a similar way to having a bad boss.

Mentors can provide quality advice no matter the level of their mentee; even if you're a senior developer with 10 years experience, having a mentor will improve the quality of your work. When the guidance from that mentor is good and valid without being overly critical, the mentor and mentee both learn and grow; but when it isn't, the mentor learns nothing and the mentee learns to ignore them, or worse, to doubt themselves.

In short: mentors can build developers, and they can break them.

Programmers, despite being in an isolating field (see the next section), are team-workers at heart. No one who gets paid to develop software does so in a vacuum, or at least, not for very long. It is human to want to be part of something bigger than yourself, and programmers are human, at least as far as we know.