Michael Herold

One of the duties I have at work is to mentor some of the Rails developers on our team. I enjoy this immensely, yet struggle with at the same time. In a previous life, I wanted to be a professor and help people learn computer science and programming. I became jaded with academia, so left it and have been working in the software industry ever since. However, I still have that urge to teach, which is why I enjoy mentoring so much. My struggles with mentoring come from my long background in software development. I have been programming in some form since I was nine years old and have been paid for programming since I was eighteen. As such, I have somewhere between 13-22 years of experience across myriad different computer-related backgrounds. I spent the majority of my waking hours from the age of fourteen to the present building my skillset. Can I really ask more junior developers to do the same? How on Earth do I reconcile that when suggesting ways to improve to my colleagues?