Someone told me recently that I'm a good teacher. I've spent most of my career quietly convinced I don't know enough (the standard imposter-syndrome loop), so it felt like a case of mistaken identity. But it stuck, because it's true: over the last few years I've drifted toward mentoring juniors more and more. Which raised an uncomfortable question. Why? Is it feeding my ego? I've spent fifteen years trying to shrink my ego, not feed it. So which is it?
The more I sat with it, the more I landed somewhere that surprised me.
Teaching is a forcing function for understanding
The mechanism is simple and a little brutal: you can't teach what you don't actually understand. You can fake it in a meeting. You can fake it in a design doc. You cannot fake it in front of someone who is trying, in good faith, to learn from you and keeps asking "but why?"
The clearest example didn't happen at work. When my youngest was six, I tried to teach her drums. I'd played guitar for years, but I barely knew my way around a kit. So I did the only honest thing - I went and studied. All the recommended fundamentals, the exercises, the way good drummers actually build timing. And as I understood each piece, I turned around and showed her.
She got good. At six years old she could hold a beat; steadier than most adults. But the quiet result was that I got better too, because teaching her forced me to genuinely learn the thing instead of hand-waving through it. That's the pattern. Teaching pulls the understanding out of you whether you had it or not.
Being accountable for someone else's success
Years later I was a tech lead in a large org with an offshore on-call team. They were stuck at tier-one response, pipeline breaks, they restart it, hope it holds. Anything deeper and they were blocked, because nobody had ever shown them how the pipelines were actually stitched together.
So I changed how I worked with them. I pulled them onto deployment bridges and comms so they could see what was coming instead of getting surprised at 3am. I sat with them one-on-one and walked through how each pipeline was wired, what depended on what, where it tended to break, how to read the failure. I decided to make myself accountable for their success, not just my own.
They got sharper. I became a go-to person. And notice what that is: it's the opposite of ego protection. Hoarding knowledge is the ego move, it keeps you indispensable and everyone else dependent. Teaching gives the knowledge away and ties your reputation to whether other people thrive. That's a bet against your own ego, not for it.
Good abstractions teach on their own
The same instinct shows up in how I build. At another org I developed platform frameworks and handed them off to entire teams. I made them easily configurable, so teams could onboard fast without needing to understand the guts on day one.
But the good part happened later. Over time, those teams learned the complexity that the modules had abstracted away - and they started extending the framework to patterns I'd never built for. The abstraction wasn't a wall that hid the mechanics from them. It was a ramp. It let them onboard, then taught them the internals, then got out of their way so they could take it somewhere new. That's mentoring encoded in software.
The takeaway
I think I gravitate toward teaching because it's the most reliable way I know to actually understand something - and because being accountable for someone else's growth is a healthier use of ego than protecting my own. The imposter feeling probably never fully goes away. But it turns out that the honest response to "I'm not sure I know enough" is to go learn it well enough to explain it to a six-year-old, an on-call engineer, or a whole team.
If you're a senior engineer wondering whether mentoring is worth the time it pulls away from "real work"; it is the real work. It's the fastest way I've found to deepen your own mastery while making yourself the kind of person others get better around. Give the knowledge away. You'll be surprised how much of it you finally understand.
0 Comments
Leave a Comment