Sooner or later the person who asks you for an hour a month is a tester, or a support engineer, or a designer, or somebody who spends their week in reports and spreadsheets. You are a developer. Your first thought is that you are the wrong person, and that you should say so kindly and pass them on.
Hold that thought for a minute, because it is half right and the wrong half is the one people act on.
You genuinely cannot teach them their craft. You do not know how a good tester decides where to look, and you have opinions about it that are worth very little because they were formed from the outside. If you forget that, you will spend six months gently suggesting they become a slightly worse version of you, which is the standard failure here and it is done with the best intentions.
But look at what actually blocks people in their first years, in any of these jobs. Their work is invisible until something goes wrong. They cannot tell whether they are behind. They have an opinion in a meeting and no idea how to get it heard. They do not know what happens to the thing they hand over. They are unsure which of the twenty things in front of them matters. None of that is craft. All of it is the same in every discipline in the building, and you have a decade of scar tissue on it.
So be explicit about the split at the start. Say out loud which half you can help with, and ask them to find somebody in their own discipline for the other half. That sentence costs you nothing and saves both of you a slow disappointment.
Then do something that feels backwards. Spend the first session asking them to teach you their job. Watch them do a piece of it. You get a map of how your work lands on somebody else, which will change how you write tickets for the rest of your career, and they get to be the expert for twenty minutes, which quietly flattens the slope between you.
Monday: ask one person outside your discipline to walk you through one real piece of their week.
– Asael Shinder
