Your mentee has moved teams, and the first thing they are given is the reporting service. Your reporting service. You wrote most of it four years ago, in a hurry, for a deadline nobody now remembers. At your next session they mention it carefully, the way people mention a relative's cooking. There are some strange parts.
You know there are. You also feel an urge to explain every one of them, and that urge deserves some care.
You are now two things to this person at once. Their mentor, and the author of the code that is making their week harder. If you let those blur, they will stop being honest with you about the most important work they have, because nobody wants to criticise a system to the person who built it and also helps with their career.
So name it first. I wrote most of that, and some of it I would not write again. Tell me exactly what is hurting. Then mean it when they do.
Give them the history, which is the one thing nobody else can. Why the second database exists. Which customer the odd date handling was for. What you meant to fix and never did. Keep it brief and factual, and resist turning each explanation into a defence. Context is useful to them. Justification is only useful to you.
Then hand it over properly. Tell them plainly that they do not need your blessing to change, rewrite or delete anything. If they want your view on a big change, give it as one opinion among several, and point them to whoever owns the system now as the person who decides.
Stay out of the back channels. Do not mention to their lead that the rewrite seems ambitious. Do not quietly fix a bug in it one evening because you happen to know where it is. Each of those tells your mentee that the system is still yours, and that their ownership is on loan.
Watch what you feel when they change something you were proud of. A small pang is normal. It is also a good sign. Code that somebody cares enough to improve is code that is still alive.
The best outcome here is a mentee who knows the system better than you within a year, and treats your original version as the starting point it always was.
– Asael Shinder
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