Senior software package developer Angie Jones explains how she uses Twitter – where she has over 76,000 followers – to press the boundaries of what it means to be a ‘mentor’
- Developer Angie Jones, with 76k Twitter followers, considers herself a digital mentorship innovator.
- Jones has experienced key mentors throughout her practically 20 year career and wishes to spend it ahead.
- She experiments with widening her impact through social media and making community.
- See far more stories on Insider’s company page.
Angie Jones, acknowledged as techgirl1908 to her far more than 76,000 Twitter followers, considers herself an innovator of electronic mentorship. Alternatively of delivering traditional a person-on-1 direction to builders, she experiments with new means to join with them employing social media.
Jones’ skilled profession spans nearly 20 several years and she presently works as the senior director of developer relations at $250 million automation platform Applitools.
Her own mentorship journey started shortly right after she joined IBM as an engineer in the early 2000s: She remembers putting up a conversation with a software developer named Fonda Ingram about an award on her business office wall for a patented invention. Instead of just telling Jones about the award, Ingram taught her how to use for patents herself and even took the time to brainstorm ideas with her.
“She did not just force information and facts to me: She pulled me in and she mentored me. She guided me,” Jones explained. “I was incredibly early in my vocation – a lot less than two many years in – but that caught with me.” 
Jones inevitably earned 26 patents of her personal and the honorific title “master inventor,” which IBM bestows on workers who have mastered the patent process.
Jones labored at IBM for eight decades, as perfectly as Teradata, Twitter, and others, ahead of landing at Applitools in August 2018. Given that Ingram, she’s experienced a handful of other mentors who’ve helped her navigate the tech sector and open doorways, inspiring her to commence offering conventional mentorship herself in 2012. She now has a handful of mentees with whom she retains experience-to-experience meetings to observe development toward their ambitions. But she’s also recognized that this strategy isn’t as powerful as she’d like it to be.
“The structure there just does not definitely get the job done for me: Having like, ‘Oh, we’re likely to meet the moment a month on Tuesdays at 9:00 AM’ or no matter what,” Jones claimed. “It just will become regimen.”
She realized she could make an outsized impression by intentionally participating with builders on Twitter.
“I imagine this is sort of a newer, a lot more modern day kind of mentorship exactly where you can get that steerage, that input from folks who you wouldn’t essentially have entry to in the previous,” Jones claimed.
She’s tried out to make herself “extremely obtainable,” which include by web hosting reside audio conversations.
“I publicly mentor: I’m sharing advice all the time,” Jones mentioned. “If you have specific thoughts, come to feel absolutely free to get to out to me.”
Most of her official mentees – and ones that ask for mentorship – are underrepresented men and women in tech trying to get somebody who understands their certain challenges.
“I was 12 many years into my job in advance of I at any time coded with another Black programmer. I really don’t imagine persons know 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 sense alone and are continually dealing with microaggressions in the place of work.”
Regardless of creating up 13% of the US population, Black gurus depict just 5% of the tech workforce, 3% of tech executives, and 1% of tech founders, in accordance to data from the Kapor Middle.
“I mentor publicly for the reason that I can not work in each tech organization alongside individuals who are marginalized,” Jones reported, “But I can be available on Twitter as a continuous reminder to them that they are not on your own and I’m just one particular tweet away when they require me.”
Jones has also experimented with “modern mentorship” by building community. For case in point, she connected 3 folks who experienced attained out to her for tips in a group chat so that they can learn from each other as very well as from her.
“I observed that this has been very effective for the reason that they feel they have a aid team as very well as me as their mentor, without having me acquiring to dedicate to every single a single of them personally,” Jones explained.
She’s recently posted information all over sharing remedies to code problems, inquiring for promotions, and being aware of when to leave a occupation.
“I enjoy seeing persons improve,” Jones stated. “Some of them have state-of-the-art to the stage in which they are then in a position to shell out it ahead and mentor someone else. And which is just exceptionally fulfilling.”