Meeting C++ 2025 - How to become obsolete: a guide to software engineering mentorship

Roth Michaels

On Day 2 at 13:15 (CET/Berlin) in Track A [Saphir Room and online]

A sign of a good leader is that over time their team no longer requires their leadership. This allows a leader to look forward and take on new projects or larger teams/organizations to scale their impact. For an organization this trajectory of a leader also removes long-term reliance on a single point of success to ensure the ability to work with a codebase is not compromised when the original leaders are gone.

A team no longer needing their leader is not merely a topic of team autonomy. Engineering leaders—whether senior/staff engineers, team leads, or managers—may have specialized programming language/tooling knowledge, domain expertise, or institutional knowledge that is relied upon by those they lead. This knowledge bottleneck is not scalable which is why mentorship and skill development of engineers one leads is so important.

In this talk we will cover real experiences from the speaker becoming first obsolete on their team, teams, and then organization. We will discuss mentorship and teaching methods from pair programming to the socratic method. We will also look at examples of real world bugs and how to teach someone to find the solution vs merely unblocking a less experienced developer.

Please login to comment