3.1Teaching vs. Telling

There is a fundamental difference between telling a junior engineer "write a test for this" and teaching them how to think about what needs testing and why. Telling produces compliance. Teaching produces capability. The goal of mentoring is not to create someone who follows your instructions. It is to create someone who, given an unfamiliar situation, can figure out the right approach on their own.

Great mentors do not produce people who test the way they test. Great mentors produce people who think critically about quality and develop their own effective style.