Your mentee opens the call with something you were not expecting. I think I might be done with this. Not the job. The whole field.
Your first instinct will be to talk them out of it. You love this work, you can see their potential, and you already have a list of reasons ready. Hold the list. If you lead with persuasion, they will stop telling you the truth, and the truth is the only thing that helps here.
Start by finding out what done means. Ask what a good week would look like if they left. Ask when they first noticed the feeling. Very often the answer points at something much smaller than an industry. A manager who drains them. An on call rota that never ends. A codebase that makes them feel stupid every morning. Two years of building features nobody uses. Those are real problems, but they live in one team, not in a whole profession.
Then ask what they would miss. Most people can name something quickly. Untangling a puzzle at four in the afternoon. A colleague they trust. The moment a thing they built finally works. Whatever they name is a clue to the corner of this field that might still suit them, and the field has many corners. Support engineering, developer education, product, data, internal tools at a hospital rather than a startup. Introduce them to one or two people who moved sideways instead of out.
And sometimes they really are done, and that is allowed. People leave software to teach, to run a family business, to retrain as nurses. Some are much happier for it. If that is where they are heading, your job changes. Help them leave well. Talk about money and timing, about which of their skills transfer, about keeping a door open by leaving on good terms.
Watch for the version that is really exhaustion. If they sound flat about everything, not just work, gently suggest they talk to a doctor or someone trained for that, and say clearly that you will still be here either way.
Whatever they decide, do not make your approval part of the decision. Mentoring is not recruiting people to stay in your world. It is helping one person see their own choices clearly, and then backing the one they make.
– Asael Shinder
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