You might consider mentoring a new grad yourself – even if you’re not confident in your growth opportunities, you’ve got over a decade of experience now and could probably offer a lot to a new kid. I think that it may be too late for us to take advantage of something like this, but growing the culture of mentoring from the ground up is the only way it’s going to take root in the community as a whole.

There are some unique community-based coding opportunities here, though. But they’re vastly oversubscribed and are rejecting people left/right. It’s not really a mentorship thing, it’s more of an incubator thing. I’m always looking out, though.

I’ve considered PMP certification but I don’t qualify for the PMP exam. I do have project management experience but it’s just not enough. Would it be better to go for CAPM first? That said, I’ve gone to the library and read PMBOK cover-to-cover, and I use that knowledge in projects, so I’m confident that I’m cut out for PMP.

@Megano! – yes, that sounds like a smart move. I had a few professors with good relations but unfortunately I had always planned to move away from college after completing my bachelor’s, and moving into the NYC area meant that I was cut off from my university community and stranded up here unless I enrolled in grad school (which I declined to seek due to cost reasons). I took three different internships up here and none of them turned into any ongoing relationships because that wasn’t really why those managers hired “interns”. (As in, it was never their intent to be mentors, they just wanted free assistants to do gruntwork) I took a lot of temp-to-perm jobs after that, but, no mentor-minded people there, either. And, as I’ve said above, I do go to many meetups but I find that very few people make themselves available for mentoring relationships. I still hold out hope that I’ll serendipitously run into someone who is a willing mentor, I’m a little more worried that I’m at the point where I ought to be the mentor, that I’m too long-in-the-tooth to earn the attention of anyone looking to get people started with their careers. (I called my university alumni association in regards to this, and they were unable to figure out what to do with me when I said I was a graduate looking for a local mentor up here, not a mentor looking for an undergrad to instruct. Useless people.)

That said, have you ever gone to a user-group meeting? I work in the Java world but *UGs of any stripe can be useful for this. My BF found a great mentor through a JUG in Greenville, SC a few years ago that really helped kick off his career.

The other place I’ve seen some serious mentoring happen is in open source, but you have to choose your project carefully because there are a lot of assholes out there.

Since I was hired at Sun I haven’t written a line of code – they started laying off folks and I have the soft (read: girl) skills that they needed to take over the admin aspects of my team. Now, 7 years later at the-place-that-bought-Sun I run the project. I miss coding, but haven’t done it in so long that re-entry is close to impossible.

If you want to switch to management, have you looked into the PMP cert? I’m doing the application this week. It’s a bitch, but should be worth 120k to start when I’m ready to move on to the next thing.

What’s even worse about this is that there’s a very binary, oft-quoted view in the industry that “good coders are 20x better than bad coders” and that bad coders can’t be (efficiently) instructed to improve their work. So, if anything, this is an industry that abhors one-on-one direct instruction as a worker education tool.

This is why there are thousands of “ninja programmer” spots available while thousands of average or hopeful programmers are constantly rejected for consideration. It’s pretty counter-intuitive.

If anyone in that industry could be persuaded to change their minds about this and invest some personal time into reviewing the work of young hopefuls, that would be great. I think it’s too late for me, because I’m 12 years out of college and I just want an exit from the technical side of things. I feel like I’m better at managing projects, and I don’t have the time to jump among trendy development tools every day of the week.