The Bike Shed 475: Invisible Mentorship
Sep 23, 2025
Sally and Aji delve into the concept of invisible mentorship, particularly within code reviews. They discuss the nuances of providing feedback, including when to initiate conversations and how to tailor insights based on developers' experiences. The duo highlights the importance of empathy and communication styles, and the value of draft pull requests as tools for collaboration. They also touch on neurodiversity and the crucial role of context in feedback. Join them as they explore the dynamics of mentoring in tech!
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Pick The Right Moment For Feedback
- Use PRs and pairing as primary places to give feedback but pick the right moment for deeper discussion.
- Defer non-urgent, higher-level conversations to team meetings or tickets to avoid blocking progress.
Trade Urgency For Practicality
- Urgent fixes deserve pragmatic acceptance rather than lengthy stylistic debates at the PR level.
- Save consistency decisions for audits or automated checks to scale improvements reliably.
Solve Inconsistency With Team Rules
- When inconsistency is widespread, run a team audit and decide a single approach together.
- Then add automated linters or checks so new code follows the agreed style automatically.