# Engineering Mentorship at Asana | Building Asana > Asana places a huge emphasis on mentorship to help every individual succeed professionally and personally. Source: https://asana.com/inside-asana/engineering-mentorship-at-asana ## Engineering mentorship at Asana One of my favorite things about working at Asana is how much we invest in teaching each and every individual at the company. It starts on your very first day as a new hire and continues through your whole career, changing to fit your needs as you learn and mature. Even our co-founders place tremendous value on internal and external coaching to better understand themselves and how they contribute to our ultimate mission. In this post, I’ll talk specifically about what kind of mentorship a new engineer can expect to receive at Asana. Starting a new job can be pretty anxiety-inducing; like the angle and velocity of a rocketship, it can feel like the first few weeks in a new role will significantly shape the trajectory of your whole career. Thankfully, Asana gives you lots of co-pilots to help you steer. We have many different kinds of mentors at Asana. In your first few weeks on the job, you’ll go through an onboarding process under the watchful tutelage of an **onboarding mentor**, rapidly soaking up information from across the engineering organization. As you transition into your role, be it as an intern or a full-time member of the team, one of **your manager**’s core responsibilities is to help you achieve your desired career trajectory. You’ll also be able to tap into a robust and active living **peer mentorship** system that caters to a wide range of topics. And finally, one of Asana’s most unique perks: you’ll have access to a wide array of formal, **external coaches**. ## Onboarding Mentors As engineers, we know that building a system that won’t need constant maintenance in the future is better than just getting something shoddy out the door; for things that last, an initial investment is repaid many times over. One of the greatest factors in success is never being blocked, especially in your first few weeks, where lack of context and information can stymie you at unexpected turns. Your onboarding mentor will be your personal unblocker. This person is always an engineer on your team, and always has a desk next to yours, so communication is as simple as turning your head. In general, there are two kinds of knowledge your mentor will help you acquire: One kind is raw domain knowledge. No matter how extensive your documentation, there is knowledge that will always live inside other engineers’ heads. Your mentor will help a lot with this, through pair coding and teaching. The second, more useful kind, is how to discover other domain knowledge. Your mentor will show you the tools we use, where documentation lives, how to read it, and introduce you to subject matter experts. As you get more practice doing this, you’ll rely less and less on others’ help. Two years ago, my own mentor, constantly acted as though he had no idea what the answer to any problem was, and would show me how he would find out. There would be a simple bug, and he would ask me how I would approach it. Whenever there was a part of my approach that I got stuck on, or was not effective, he would tell me about a resource I didn’t know existed, and show me how to use it. This is a common pattern. At Asana, we’re all believers in that old adage about teaching people how to fish. As engineers, we know that building a system that won’t need constant maintenance in the future is better than just getting something shoddy out the door; for things that last, an initial investment is repaid many times over. The same principle applies to our new fellow engineers, who will soon be building services we depend on, or features we build on top of. Our onboarding process is flexible, too. My software engineering education wasn’t extremely formal, yet I was the onboarding mentor for a new hire with little experience in this area. Initially, it was a struggle for both of us because my teaching style didn’t match up with their learning style. So we decided to switch mentors to somebody who was better equipped to teach software engineering patterns, and things worked out very well. Ultimately, the role of the onboarding mentor is done when you know how to unblock yourself, but their role as a mentor in your career growth will continue long past this point. ## Managers Managers are best at helping you discover where you want to be and how to get there. Very high up on a manager’s list of responsibilities is to “serve as [a] mentor; help individuals develop and achieve their personal and career goals”. Notice that this is not phrased as, “get the most work out of each individual” or “keep individual as productive as possible.” Instead, many of our 1:1s focus on identifying what direction to push ourselves in, and how best to do it. This isn’t just lip-service – a manager core incentive is helping people achieve personal growth. Making an individual co-worker more productive, multiplied over the net amount of time they work at a company, is one of the most leveraged things anybody can do for the company. Our co-founder wrote a [lengthy perspective](https://medium.com/bridge-collection/goldilocks-management-c01c6846e06e) on how we approach management at Asana; this passage highlights the very real benefits of our philosophy: …Josh Smith, [joined] us as a developer straight out of college, after first doing an internship. He already was great at some things related to his role, but will admit he was lacking in many others. Josh said that his manager, [Jack](http://www.quora.com/Jack-Stahl), pushed him to test his boundaries in these areas specifically, “at a speed where I was constantly challenged, but not overwhelmed.” This ensured he grew quickly. After just a little less than a year as a full time developer, Josh has gained enough institutional knowledge and experience to become a program lead and begin playing the mentor role himself. However, as good engineers know, having a single point of failure for any system, including non-technical ones like personal growth, is not ideal. So we have lots of other avenues for you to learn from your teammates. ## Peer Mentorship The most concrete benefit is knowing who you can talk to when you’re blocked. The whole team is invested in ramping you up, especially in your first few weeks. We have a series of short onboarding talks, given by other engineers, that introduce a major concept (e.g. our data model, testing, security), accompanied by a text form of the information. Some people learn better by hearing information, and some learn better by reading, so we try to provide both. We space these out over a period of time, so you get a chance to practice what you learn in between absorbing the information. But the most concrete benefit is knowing who you can talk to when you’re blocked. Aside from just technical knowledge, there are lots of skills to pick up, and your teammates are a talented bunch. We keep an ongoing project in Asana where people offer and request peer mentorship on a wide array of topics. Some current examples include interviewing, agile methodology, communication, and leadership. Often, these are very cross-functional; in fact, even in the course of writing this blog post (my first one!), I’ve learned a lot from my teammates who work much more with content. Even though there are no formal incentives for coaching, it turns out people are very excited about doing this. Most of us enjoy sharing our skills, and everybody is interested in building strong connections outside of our immediate team. We default to making these mentorship relationships public, and it’s a very gratifying feeling seeing others “heart” that you’re learning, say, product development from our lead PM. _Some of our current peer mentorship offerings_ ## Formal Coaching One of our coolest (in my opinion) perks is formal, external coaching from a range of impressive and experienced teachers. Life coaching, executive skills, interpersonal relationships, communications…it’s a cornucopia of coaching. A cornucoachpia. Coachnucopia. Learnucopia. I need a portmanteau coach (“portmentor”).I’ve experienced a lot of growth by working with one of our coaches, Annelène Decaux. She initially helped me with communication and career planning, and then moved into better emotional self-awareness. This has definitely helped with my work at Asana. For example, I’ve learned to recognize when I believe something because of emotional attachment to a project instead of genuine technical and product needs. But it’s also made a significant impact on my life outside of work as well. Ultimately, this is one of the most liberating and refreshing tenets of how we view work at Asana. We really believe that a team that is happy, healthy, and has a good work-life balance, will lead to building an effective, thoughtful product. Mentorship plays an integral role in building such a team. Since each person comes in with different skills and different goals, we use whatever blend of teachers and methods is most effective to keep each person growing. This ties into our deeply-ingrained attitude of self-improvement, which I consider to be core to a great culture. People are continuously looking for ways that they can do better. Even when things go wrong, without blaming others or themselves, they grow collectively and foster an environment of consistent improvement. Let us know how mentors have helped shape your career, at any stage, in the comments. Finally, we’re always looking for people to bring their skills, expertise, and personality to our team. Explore [current job openings at Asana](http://www.asana.com/jobs). - [캐시를 그대로 유지하여 브라우저 에이전트의 비용을 76배 절감하고 속도를 5배 향상시킨 방법](/ko/inside-asana/cut-browsers-agent-cost) 엔지니어링 인공 지능(AI) #### StackAI CTO 코드 조사부터 결과 측정까지 4가지 모델에 걸쳐 Codex에서 GPT-6 Astra를 사용한 연구조사한 이유Asana는 StackAI를 통해 플랫폼에 에이전트 워크플로 자동화를 도입하고 있으며, Asana의 규모에서는 사소한 비효율성이 누적됩니다. 저희의 목표는 답변 품질을 저하시키지 않으면서 하나의 브라우저 에이전트 ... - [관리 콘솔의 마이크로 프레임워크](/ko/inside-asana/microframeworks-admin-console) 엔지니어링 모든 Asana 배포에는 관리 콘솔이 있습니다. 여기에서 IT 관리자는 비밀번호 요구 사항, 역할 및 권한, Dropbox에서 파일을 첨부할 수 있는지 여부, 기본 설정으로 새 프로젝트를 볼 수 있는 사용자 등 회사가 Asana를 사용하는 방식을 설정합니다.Asana가 성장함에 따라 관리 콘솔에는 수년간의 사용자 지정 ... - [사양 중심 개발: 장점 - 그리고 3개월 후 얻은 교훈](/ko/inside-asana/spec-driven-development) 엔지니어링 #### 스태프 소프트웨어 엔지니어 3개월이 지난 후, 우리는 추가된 구조가 언제 도움이 되었고 언제 방해가 되었는지 더 명확하게 파악할 수 있었습니다.저희 엔지니어 중 한 명이 데이터 마이그레이션을 준비하고 있었고, 업무 계획을 세우기 위해 사양 중심 개발(SDD)을 사용하기로 했습니다. SDD는 엔지니어가 초기에 누락 사항을 파악하고, 접근 방식을 더 ... - [우리는 2주 만에 Enzyme에서 마이그레이션했습니다. 5년이 걸렸어야 했습니다.](/ko/inside-asana/migrating-off-enzyme-2-weeks) 엔지니어링 최근에 우리는 AI를 사용하여 한 번의 스프린트에서 수년간의 엔지니어링 작업을 완료했습니다. 그 방법과 이것이 가능성에 대한 우리의 생각을 변화시킨 이유를 소개합니다.5년 문제2022년에 우리는 Asana의 프런트엔드 테스트 스위트를 오래된 테스트 라이브러리인 Enzyme에서 React Testing Library(RT ... - [Engineering mentorship at Asana](/ko/inside-asana/engineering-mentorship-at-asana) 엔지니어링 One of my favorite things about working at Asana is how much we invest in teaching each and every individual at the company. It starts on your very first day as a new hire and con ... - [엔지니어링](/inside-asana/engineering-spotlight)