Jae Joson\n\nI am from Comcast, all the way on the East Coast, so I don't know what you guys think the weather is like here, but it's very nice to meet all of you. This is my first time at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. This is my first time speaking up on the stage in person, so this is a great opportunity. Thank you. Thank you.\n\nThank you. So to start, to say a little bit about me: I am a technical program manager within Comcast, within a dojo now. So if you came from one of those talks earlier, you know a little bit about that. But before that, I've had a couple different careers. I started off as an English teacher in high school for juniors, so those of you who have juniors, good luck with the SATs. No, I loved it. It was great. It was a great experience. The kids loved me because I tried to ignore them most of the time. Reverse psychology is a great thing.\n\nAt the end of my fourth year, I was tenured and everything was going great. One of my TAs, I had like eight of them, asked me, \"Oh, what are you going to do when we're gone? You're going to be so sad. You have to make a whole new group of people like you again.\" And I had an existential crisis moment where I realized I would have to make a whole new generation of children actually like me again.\n\nSo I had to contemplate what I was going to do next. Was I going to stay in teaching for a long time, or was I going to try something different? After looking through my options, I stumbled onto a coding boot camp called Zip Code Wilmington, located on the West Coast, or East Coast, sorry, in Delaware. And after looking at the reviews, doing my good research, I took the leap and I went for three months. It was 13-hour days, seven days a week. It was a lot. I don't have the stamina to do it again, but I have no regrets about what I did.\n\nOnce I got out of that, it was on to the job-hunting arena, which was brand new, completely different. Never had been on that job search before. And I managed to get into Comcast because they were recruiting specifically for early-career talent, and that was a new push that they had. So I was very excited my first time stepping in that building. It was such a great opportunity to kind of see what it looked like and how I could be a part of something like that, even though I didn't come from a traditional background.\n\nSo this talk, the reason why you're here, is all about mentorship and mentoring and how to be a mentor and be a mentee.\n\nWhen I started, I didn't know what that was, or I knew about it on an objective level, you know, in the clouds, theoretically. I didn't know what it was to have a mentor. I didn't know that was a norm, because when you're teaching, you learn from somebody and then they say, \"Good luck,\" and you kind of just have to make up your own curriculum, your own paperwork, your own everything.\n\nBut here, I realized that it would be helpful if you knew somebody who had gone through the ropes and would be able to share a lot about what they've learned and what they think would be best for you.\n\nSo even though I didn't exactly know about mentoring and being a mentor or being a mentee, luckily two people did that I encountered. And I honestly believe I was adopted by those mentors instead of having gone out and searched for them. One of them is sitting right here. He's now my boss. And the other one is making his way up in the ranks, and he's too busy to talk to me anymore. But it's okay. He's doing hard work. He's doing hard work.\n\nAnd I honestly believe that by being in the same space and having been going to the areas where I would just encounter them, and then reaching out and saying, \"Hi, how are you doing? What are you working on?\" that's the only reason I'm standing here. The only reason I'm on that team. It's the only reason I would be able to give back and actually be a mentor, which will come later.\n\nBut as a mentee, I like to think that they adopted me because I looked like somebody who needed help and I was somebody worth investing in. But I found out this morning that they liked me for my viral LinkedIn video that I took of the distinguished engineer who rapped to \"Ice Ice Baby.\" I didn't know who that distinguished engineer was. I thought it was just a funny video and I just uploaded it, and then later I was like, \"Oh no, I have an engineer one, and I just dissed a distinguished engineer. I don't know what that means, but it sounds bad. Maybe I should find him and apologize.\" But luckily he thought it was hilarious, so I continued my journey, and I'm still at Comcast.\n\nBut I learned along the way that being a mentee isn't a passive experience. Though you might think that at the beginning. You think somebody adopts you, or you find a mentor, and then it's just a knowledge pour onto yourself. That's not how it works, unfortunately or fortunately.\n\nSo one of the people who was supposed to be here today, Leslie Chapman, created a very nice step list of things you should do to be a good mentee. And I'm going to go through that and kind of tell you what my stories are for each one.\n\nSo first, identify your goals and opportunities for improvement. The big one is: have a goal. Maybe you don't know what your goal is. Maybe it's come up with a goal, something that you can actually go and talk to the mentor about so the time that you spend together isn't wasted. It's actually going towards something targeted.\n\nThe second one: identify people you respect and would like mentorship from. I think that's what I did, and then my advice to you is get adopted by them. Do what you have to do. Show up. Be in the area.\n\nA couple of the pictures that are going by, you'll see the name BEngineers on them. My boss has Engineers on his shirt. You've got gear on the back. That's our official logo. That's a technology resource group within Comcast. That group has done so much in terms of trying to support, grow, develop Black technologists and supporters of Black technologists within the company. And I think, based off of what I've done, it became a gradual, \"Oh, just join us. Be a part of us. Pick up these things. You can learn how to do this. If you're just in the area, you'll learn about all the different stuff.\"\n\nAnd that's essentially what happened. Somehow it became like an amoeba effect. I think I just got slurped up, and I'm the communications lead for that group now. So it's been a great process of just being a part of something, but not necessarily having known you were going to learn all of those things.\n\nBut I think being open, which is the third one, being open and honest with your mentor is how you actually gain the full benefits. If I lied to Mike, my boss, when he was my mentor, I wouldn't be standing here because he would think everything is okay. Because on the outside, I look great. Sometimes on the inside, I'm dying, usually.\n\nSo if I didn't express, and I did tell him that. Mike, I did, regularly. I would go to Mike and I would say, \"Mike, I don't know what I'm doing.\" He'd be like, \"That's okay. Do you know what you don't know?\" And sometimes I'd say yes, and sometimes I would say no, but I think because I was honest and I picked him to be my honest person, he was able to help me in the right way.\n\nHe didn't have to be like, \"Okay, everything's fine. Just continue on with your life. Everything sounds great. I don't need to give you extra help or show you maybe this is a different path. I can help you figure things out.\" So honesty is good.\n\nBe open to your mentor's feedback. I don't think he's ever been mean to me, but in case someone is mean, double-check whether or not that criticism is truly proper criticism, if it's good feedback. Because sometimes we go through our day to day and it's easy, which is nice sometimes for the mental break, but in the end it hurts a little bit, and in the long term it might hurt us a little bit more.\n\nSo in my original position, where I was staying as an engineer, it probably would have hurt me if I just pretended that everything was okay and that I was in the position I wanted to be in for the rest of the time period, which goes back to that honesty step. So just make sure that if you're having a conversation when you're with your mentor and they say something and you cry on the inside or maybe on the outside a little bit, emotions are okay, that you take a moment and you reflect on why it's hurting you in the way it is and whether or not you can do anything about it.\n\nThe fifth one: do the homework and follow the suggestions your mentor gives you, because that's important. Homework continues even outside of school. So just make sure that if they give you advice, that you take it. As a mentee, they're giving you time. They're giving opportunities. They're giving you maybe networking. If you're asked to reach out to somebody, reach out to somebody.\n\nAll the connections that are seen through these pictures are connections that we built all together as BEngineers. And each time that we had to reach out to somebody, it was somebody's task or it was assigned to them, or it was a network connection that was built through somebody else. Without maintaining or fostering those connections, we wouldn't be able to put on the conferences that we do or establish the connections that we have on a regular basis.\n\nSo mentees also can be mentors, and that could be every single one of you. If you're an edge one or someone down there and you zoned out, stop zoning out. Leslie Chapman would have words for you.\n\nYou always have something to provide, and I think that's something that took me a really long time to figure out. And by really long time, I meant two years. There are different forms of mentorship. And the great thing about them is you can have more than one mentor. You're not cheating at life. You're actually winning. Okay, so you can have more than one mentor. They just might be helping you out in different ways.\n\nSo the one thing that I want to mention is it's even better if you have a non-traditional background or if you have a different path that you took to be able to get to the position where you were at, because it'll be influential for people like me who might not be seeing senior leaders or mentors or anyone who falls in that category as someone who came from a different path.\n\nBecause I wouldn't expect, when I started, someone who had graduated from a boot camp to be a mentor to me because I didn't know that there were a lot of them in the industry. But now I know there's a lot of us. There's a lot of us in there. Anyone from boot camps here? You are the favorite.\n\nSo yeah, find people who are non-traditional. It's a great avenue. If you have side projects, use that as your bridge. My boss DJs, you know, he does DJing on the side. I'm his manager, though, so you can't have him. So that's a great way to again make that connection with someone who could be your mentee, even if you don't work on the same team or even if you didn't get to the same path. Outside-of-work conversations are beneficial too.\n\nI just connected with somebody who's not going to be my mentor, but we were gushing about video games and we were talking about Hollow Knight, which is a great one, one of my favorites. I never would have talked to that person otherwise, but that was a great bridge for me to be like, \"Oh, I'll be able to talk to him if I ever figure out something later that maybe is related.\"\n\nIt's beneficial to everyone, even if you don't see it short-term. Maybe in a couple years later you see a job opening and you're like, \"Oh, I know that person because of this conversation I had with them or because of the connection I made with them as a mentee or a mentor.\" And it doesn't have to be a forever-long process. Your mentorship or your mentee-ship doesn't have to be a five-year commitment. Sometimes you only need it for a small amount of time, and that's okay.\n\nNow, one thing I want to mention is mentors, sometimes you have to go out and find your mentee because we don't know you exist and we don't know that we need one. And sometimes we just don't know where to look. I don't know when I started what counts as a mentor, if it was an official title somewhere or if there was a pool of mentors and I could just pick one. So sometimes you have to go into the group or the table and just be like, \"Yeah, you. You'll be good. Let's mentee for a little bit, okay?\"\n\nAnd sometimes some of us are just observers, which is how I made the connection with Mike and Mumin. I came to my first conference in Comcast, which was the DevOps Days, and it was the first conference I've ever been to as part of the tech world. It was the first conference in the building. I didn't know what was going on. We got fancy little cards with our names on it. That was really cool.\n\nBut I was observing everything. And what I saw was Mumin and Mike walking around and making connections with various people, and being really respected, being super knowledgeable. They were just overall smart people, but they never had this idea of, \"I'm over you because my position is higher than you or my title is higher than yours.\" I didn't even know what their title was until about a year in, because it never came up in conversation. I also never looked it up, so maybe that was on me. It's a win-win situation.\n\nAnd I think I'm going to give you all homework, going back to the English teacher days: to find a mentor, to find a mentee, maybe at this conference, and connect. Use LinkedIn. Use Slack. Have that conversation. And it can be a mentorship or a mentee-ship of three days, and that's okay. That's a great opportunity to make that connection. Also, now that my mentor is my boss, I'm up for adoption. Let me know.\n\nAnd that's it.\n