I get a lot of mentorship requests. Everyday people reach out and want to hop on a call to talk about the things they need help with. They offer me coffee, a virtual coffee chat (whatever that is), or ask to simply “pick my brain.” They might send me 10 pages of backstory and ask what they should do next. I have to decline because if I said yes to everybody I wouldn’t have any time for myself. There’s much more demand than supply, by a long shot.
It’s not just me. When it comes to the distribution of levels at a company, there are many fewer people at the higher levels than at the bottom. At Amazon, senior engineers are about 10-15% of the population of software engineers, depending on the organization. Principals engineers and above are 1-2% of the population. I used to call it a pyramid, but now I call it a large pizza with a small pancake on top, topped with a blueberry.
These big disparities mean finding an ongoing mentorship relationship is going to be very difficult. In addition to the super flat distribution, people one or two steps ahead of you have limited capacity to help others. When you ask them for their time, you’re taking away time that they have dedicated to their own work, their family, or personal time. You are asking them for some of their most precious resource. That makes it really easy to say no.
But it would be so helpful to you! They’ve got a ton of experience, they can tell you what to avoid, what to lean-in to, and give you ways to think about things that give you valuable perspective.
Generally, people want to help. But, on top of the bandwidth problem is that many people asking for mentorship have problems expressing their needs. These folks ask for generalized help and/or give poor context, which requires work to dig for more details. This digging and searching increases the cognitive load for the mentor, and makes them not want to take on more folks in the future. In other words, they don’t make it easy for the mentor to help.
So if you need help, have been searching for someone to give it to you for a while, and haven’t had any luck, what should you do instead?
Send an email instead. More specifically, send a short email.
Explain your situation in a paragraph or less and ask for specific help. This should be a completely self-contained email with all of the context necessary to understand what type of assistance you need.
Writing a concise email is actually pretty difficult because you might think that big problems require a lot of context. This is where ChatGPT or Claude can give you a good first pass that you can edit to make your own. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
I'm reaching out for your advice on a career decision I've been grappling with. As a highly technical individual, I'm torn between pursuing the management track long-term or remaining an individual contributor. While I deeply enjoy the hands-on technical work, I also believe that I could have a more significant impact by taking on leadership and managerial responsibilities. As a manager, I could leverage my technical expertise to guide teams, set strategic directions, and drive innovation on a broader scale. However, I'm cognizant that the management path comes with its own set of challenges and potential tradeoffs. I would greatly value your perspective, given your experience navigating similar crossroads in your career. What should I do?
A self-contained, one paragraph email 1) respects their time, 2) minimizes the amount of cognitive load on them to understand what your situation is, 3) forces you to really understand your own problems, so you can state things simply before asking other people to solve your problems, and 4) demonstrates to them that you have at least enough perspective to understand the problems in front of you.
All of the possible outcomes are positive:
- You recognize the solution on your own - Rubber-ducking is a really effective technique to troubleshoot technical problems. It also helps out with career decisions. You might realize you had the answers all along.
- They ghost you or respond but let you know they don’t have the bandwidth - If they don’t have the time to help they don’t have the time to help. If this happens, you can send the email to other folks easily. Because you lessened the amount of time necessary for them to say no, it minimizes the awkwardness of future interactions.
- They ask for follow up details, route you to someone else, or start dispensing advice - They can do this async over email or, if they have some bandwidth, might be up for a meet up and have a chat with you. A note here is that they may give you a really brief answer. This is great! Big problems don’t need to have big and complicated solutions (e.g., “Don’t become a manager, it sounds like you aren’t doing it for the right reasons.”)
This approach works because you aren’t necessarily gunning for a mentor relationship, which may be time consuming and really only benefits you. Instead, you’re really being efficient about getting a mentorship outcome that is by default a low-lift for your target. It may blossom into a deeper mentor relationship, but you aren’t front-loading things with a big request. Instead, you’re leading with an easy to consume need.
This advice came from two places, a personal experience and something from my friend Ethan Evans. Ethan has a saying, which is when asking for someone else’s time who is higher-level than you are, to “be brilliant, be brief, and be gone.” The idea here is that to make a good impression with upper management, for instance, you want to get in, bring your business, then get out.
When I was a senior engineer, I was tasked with shoring up a big legacy system, to make it more robust, more available, to internationalize it, and to globalize it. I identified several Principal and Senior Principal Engineers that had built similar systems, and instead of sending over a big document with lots of details and all of the constraints I was working under, I wrote them a short email explaining the high-level work in front of me. To my surprise, they all responded and were incredibly generous with their bandwidth. We delivered the system, it rocked, we filed and were awarded several patents, and I still keep in touch with them today.
At the end of the day, being brilliant, being brief, and being gone is the secret recipe when seeking guidance from busy, high-level professionals. By mastering the art of the short yet effective email, you increase your chances of receiving invaluable guidance that can propel your career forward.