What’s the one habit your mentor passed on to you that still shapes how you work?

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In my latest article, Learning to Think in Systems: Lessons from My Mentor, I wrote about the most useful damage :stuck_out_tongue: my mentor did to my brain: I can’t look at problems in isolation anymore. I keep seeing the system that produced them.

That shift changed how I debug, how I review work, and how I think about “root cause” vs “the thing that’s on fire today”.

I’m curious:

  • What’s the one habit, question, or way of thinking your mentor burned into you?

  • What did they make you stop doing?

  • Did it feel annoying at the time but obvious in hindsight?

  • If you could permanently “ruin” one junior in a good way, what would you teach them?

Most of what we call “experience” is just someone else’s thinking that stuck.

Link to the article, incase you want to read: Learning to think in systems: Lessons from my mentor | Ministry of Testing

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@hanisha

In my previous company, whenever I missed a bug during review or when a production issue was reported, my mentor would always ask me one thing, what steps were followed when this bug occurred, and what might the user have been thinking while following those steps.

At the time, it felt repetitive, but that question slowly turned into a habit.

Now, whenever another team reports a bug related to my domain, or when a production issue comes up, I don’t just stop at the RCA. I also try to understand the thought process behind it, how someone approached the system and why they did what they did.

That transformation helps me see the problem from their perspective, not just from a testing or technical angle.

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