Dear Agony Ant, how do I tell if my testing mentor is any good?

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I joined a mentoring scheme via work, and the person I have been assigned is really nice. I am an Associate level QA and have been for about 16 months now. We have been meeting for 30 minutes once a week for around 3 months, but when I ask questions, they usually respond with asking me the same question or a variation on it. I get questions are part of coaching but I feel that I have not really learned anything yet. I am starting to feel like it is a waste of time :sob:. I thought mentoring was partly “giving direction to help me find my own way”, but also sometimes I am frikkin asking because - I really don’t know something. Do I tell them this? I keep assuming because they are so senior they must be really good. What do I do?

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I don’t know about the others, but I just have to know who Agony Ant is!

People try to avoid answering when they don’t know the answer themself, or they get aggress is say thing like they should know something and similar.

If you have 1-on-1 with your manager, and if it’s a reasonable person, try talking about this topic directly.

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I get the asking the question back and the coachee answering it themselves is part of coaching. But as mentioned, if they keep doing it over and over
 and you would not get any answers or progress, I would confront them with it in a 1:1.

Say like I need to improve and with this approach it’s not working, tell them it’s okay to ask questions back but not every single time and you are in need of some guidance and you are interested in how other people will do it.

That’s how I would tackle it :confused:

Yes please XD It feels kind of weird answering these bots XD

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