SRE/Mentorship

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Mentorship in the SRE team is a structured, personalized partnership focused on the professional and personal development of the mentee. This partnership is characterized by one-on-one engagement, where knowledge, skills, and experiences are shared within SRE practices to foster technical excellence, reliability principles, and career growth.

Mentorship is not defined by seniority, but rather by a mentee’s interest in learning and a mentor’s interest in teaching. People should seek out mentors, and also opportunities to mentor, regardless of where they are in their career.

Mentorship core elements

Building relationships between people
One-on-one engagement
Recurring meetings to teach and collaborate
Creating goals for the mentee
Listening to feedback from the mentee to improve your mentoring

Methodologies for success

A soft limit of no more than two mentees per mentor, allowing some wiggle room for those with more time to devote.
Facilitate match-making using the table of available mentors on Officewiki.
Mentoring relationships last for six months. After that time, the mentor and mentee should end the formal relationship so that they are free to join others, unless there is an extenuating circumstance. This term limit promotes a diversity of interactions on both sides and ensures we eventually clear out any queues of those requesting mentorship.

Incentivizing mentorship

Time spent in mentorship conversations should be accounted for like all other normal work. Mentorship should not be devalued relative to other priorities or seem like an excess burden. Managers should be sure to allocate time for people who are mentors or mentees and account for those time commitments during quarterly resource planning.
Mentoring history should be explicitly included as part of the evaluation process for promotions. Mentorship’s inclusion in a promotion evaluation, however, does not denote a requirement. Some people will not have a desire to mentor and that is okay.
We may be able to occasionally use travel budget, from the pool for conference attendance, to allow mentors and mentees to meet in real life, subject to budgetary constraints and tradeoffs, but this is not expected to be common at this time.

Resources

This is a very lightly-curated initial list of links on the topic of mentoring that seem relevant. This is by no means a specific endorsement of the content of any given article. If you find other compelling resources around the Internet that may be helpful to others, feel free to add them here.