Angie Jones Points out How She Utilizes Twitter to Mentor Developers

  • Developer Angie Jones, with 76k Twitter followers, considers herself a digital mentorship innovator.
  • Jones has had key mentors during her practically 20 year profession and desires to spend it forward.
  • She experiments with widening her influence via social media and creating neighborhood.
  • See additional tales on Insider’s business enterprise site.

Angie Jones, recognised as techgirl1908 to her additional than 76,000 Twitter followers, considers herself an innovator of digital mentorship. In its place of furnishing common a person-on-just one direction to builders, she experiments with new approaches to hook up with them working with social media. 

Jones’ experienced job spans virtually 20 several years and she at the moment functions as the senior director of developer relations at $250 million automation system Applitools.

Her have mentorship journey started shortly just after she joined IBM as an engineer in the early 2000s: She remembers placing up a conversation with a application developer named Fonda Ingram about an award on her office wall for a patented invention. Rather of just telling Jones about the award, Ingram taught her how to apply for patents herself and even took the time to brainstorm tips with her.

“She didn’t just push information and facts to me: She pulled me in and she mentored me. She guided me,” Jones mentioned. “I was quite early in my occupation — much less than two yrs in — but that trapped with me.” 

Jones at some point gained 26 patents of her personal and the honorific title “master inventor,” which IBM bestows on personnel who have mastered the patent process.

Jones labored at IBM for eight several years, as properly as Teradata, Twitter, and others, right before landing at Applitools in August 2018. Because Ingram, she’s had a handful of other mentors who’ve helped her navigate the tech field and open up doors, inspiring her to start off offering traditional mentorship herself in 2012. She now has a handful of mentees with whom she retains facial area-to-confront meetings to track development to their targets. But she’s also recognized that this strategy is not as efficient as she’d like it to be.

“The construction there just would not truly perform for me: Having like, ‘Oh, we’re likely to fulfill when a thirty day period on Tuesdays at 9:00 AM’ or whichever,” Jones mentioned. “It just becomes regime.”

She understood she could make an outsized affect by deliberately engaging with builders on Twitter.

“I believe this is sort of a newer, more present day kind of mentorship where by you can get that direction, that input from men and women who you would not always have entry to in the previous,” Jones mentioned.

She’s experimented with to make herself “really obtainable,” like by internet hosting are living audio conversations.

“I publicly mentor: I’m sharing guidance all the time,” Jones mentioned. “If you have precise queries, feel free to attain out to me.”

Most of her formal mentees – and ones that ask for mentorship – are underrepresented men and women in tech trying to get anyone who understands their specific issues.

“I was 12 several years into my career right before I at any time coded with one more Black programmer. I never believe individuals comprehend what that does to one’s psyche. But I do,” Jones said. “I get it. I know what it’s like to want to give up since you come to feel on your own and are consistently working with microaggressions in the place of work.”

In spite of earning up 13% of the US population, Black pros depict just 5% of the tech workforce, 3% of tech executives, and 1% of tech founders, in accordance to info from the Kapor Middle.

“I mentor publicly due to the fact I won’t be able to perform in each tech corporation along with those people who are marginalized,” Jones claimed, “But I can be accessible on Twitter as a continual reminder to them that they are not on your own and I’m just 1 tweet away when they require me.”

Jones has also experimented with “modern-day mentorship” by constructing local community. For illustration, she linked a few persons who experienced achieved out to her for suggestions in a team chat so that they can find out from each other as effectively as from her.

“I uncovered that this has been particularly effective mainly because they come to feel they have a help team as well as me as their mentor, with out me obtaining to dedicate to just about every 1 of them personally,” Jones mentioned.

She’s just lately posted information around sharing solutions to code faultsinquiring for promotions, and being aware of when to go away a work.

“I adore observing individuals increase,” Jones reported. “Some of them have highly developed to the place wherever they’re then capable to fork out it forward and mentor another person else. And that’s just really fulfilling.”