A Mentoring Win That Made Me Proud

One of my mentees recently shared some wonderful news - they landed a role they had been aiming for and I’m genuinely very happy for their success.

Moments like this are incredibly rewarding, not because of the outcome itself, but because of the work and growth that happened along the way.

When we started working together, the biggest opportunities weren’t purely technical. They were already strong technically, and the focus was on preparation in a broader sense:

• Positioning their experience clearly and confidently
• Communicating their strengths in a way that matched the roles they wanted
• Understanding how to structure interview conversations
• Knowing what interviewers actually pay attention to
• Practising a few technical exercises together to build confidence

A lot of candidates underestimate how much interviews reward clarity and composure. Technical ability matters, of course - but the ability to stay calm, think aloud, and approach problems methodically often makes the biggest difference. From my experience most interviewers are 90% there, those last 10% are that clarity, moments of calm that makes you hired.

We spent time building that calmness deliberately, approaching the solution methodically. Working through exercises that were sometimes harder than necessary helped create confidence and remove pressure. When you’ve already stretched yourself in practice, real interview questions feel far more manageable and naturally the pressure is low and you can think clearly. My first ice-hockey coach used to say, “it needs to be hard on training, so the game feels easy”.

And that’s exactly what happened.

The technical challenge they faced during the process wasn’t particularly complex, but they were prepared (even over-prepared, but that’s good). They approached it with structure, communicated clearly, and executed with confidence.

That’s what preparation is really about.

I’m genuinely very happy to see their success. Watching someone put in the effort, grow in confidence, and achieve something they’ve been working towards is one of the most fulfilling parts of mentoring.

If there’s one thing that I learned from their journey, it’s this:

Preparation is not memorising answers, spending hours on leetCode or predicting questions.

It’s about staying calm, thinking clearly, expressing thoughts aloud, communicating with interviewers and crushing that interview!