Note 9 is why I gave up trying to mentor developers.
Relevant background: I've held a career that is a dream of high profile projects: game studio owner at age 17, beta developer for original Mac in '83; on Mandelbrot & DeVanney's original Fractal research team, 3D graphics research community during the 80's; engineer on the 3DO and then original PlayStation OS teams; 15 years as a lead game developer of major release titles; 5 years VFX developer and artist and financial analysis for 9 major release VFX heavy feature films; and now 10 years in machine learning and facial recognition.
I love to mentor developers. I ran a free coworking space for 3 years where I tried mentoring many, many starting-their-career developers. I also have both undergrad and graduate school teaching experience.
Out of perhaps 3 dozen mentoring situations, only 2 people actually took the opportunity seriously. Both of them went from nearly minimum wage shit coding jobs to real development companies making in excess of $70K. The other 34 people I tried to mentor never even finished the first "let's see if this person is serious" task I gave them.
You should chat with us. Filtering for interest is important, but is very possible. We have 300+ very motivated students enrolled right now from thousands of interested applicants.
Something very basic, such as "comment what you're working on so I can help" or "just write me a brief email outlining what you want to learn" or "you are aware learning to be a developer takes more than 2 or 3 months from zero knowledge, right?"
6% success rate does not seem to be that bad result, honestly. Good work I guess :). It sounds to be good preliminary test, sort of primary checks whether that person is suitable for this kind of mentoring.
I remember myself testing waters or getting interested/curious in multiple things dropping out of most rarely keeping only some. Even within same general area sometimes I was motivated to continue and other times not.
Relevant background: I've held a career that is a dream of high profile projects: game studio owner at age 17, beta developer for original Mac in '83; on Mandelbrot & DeVanney's original Fractal research team, 3D graphics research community during the 80's; engineer on the 3DO and then original PlayStation OS teams; 15 years as a lead game developer of major release titles; 5 years VFX developer and artist and financial analysis for 9 major release VFX heavy feature films; and now 10 years in machine learning and facial recognition.
I love to mentor developers. I ran a free coworking space for 3 years where I tried mentoring many, many starting-their-career developers. I also have both undergrad and graduate school teaching experience.
Out of perhaps 3 dozen mentoring situations, only 2 people actually took the opportunity seriously. Both of them went from nearly minimum wage shit coding jobs to real development companies making in excess of $70K. The other 34 people I tried to mentor never even finished the first "let's see if this person is serious" task I gave them.