Mentorship
How to pick a mentor when you cannot tell who is good
Ratings only tell you someone was pleasant. Here are the signals that actually predict a useful hour.
Yuki Tanaka
26 June 20266 min read
Every profile looks good. Everyone is senior somewhere, everyone has five stars, and none of that tells you whether they can help with your particular problem.
Match the gap, not the title
The most useful mentor is usually two steps ahead of you, not ten. Someone who made the move you are making last year remembers the details. Someone who made it fifteen years ago remembers the story.
Seniority is a proxy for experience, and a bad one. Recency is the better filter.
Read them before you book them
Articles and posts tell you how someone thinks, which is the only thing you are actually buying. A rating tells you they turned up and were polite.
If reading them makes you want to argue, that is often a better sign than agreeing with everything.
Judge on the second session, not the first
First sessions are almost always pleasant. The real signal is whether the second one picks up where the first left off, or starts again from your background.
A mentor who remembers what you were working on is worth three who were impressive for an hour.
