Unsolicited mentorship requests

[Elena Williams]

Hiya team,

I'm confident that this is the wrong place to ask -- which list is the correct to have this conversation?

Just want to bring this up in case it's a "Thing"[tm] now, that I have missed: this last week I've had 3 different non-Australia non-female-presenting individuals who I don't know solicit me privately on social media for personal Django "mentorship". Frankly it's made me feel pretty uncomfortable, but I've never been approached like this so rather than just ruminating I thought I should just ask around if any one is familiar with this happening? It's just several in a short window of time seemed like a weird pattern.

Any advice appreciated,

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Elena Williams

Github: elena

[Daniele Procida]

Elena Williams wrote:

>Just want to bring this up in case it's a "Thing"[tm] now, that I have
>missed: this last week I've had 3 different non-Australia non-female-
>presenting individuals who I don't know solicit me privately on social
>media for personal Django "mentorship". Frankly it's made me feel pretty
>uncomfortable, but I've never been approached like this so rather than
>just ruminating I thought I should just ask around if any one is
>familiar with this happening? It's just several in a short window of
>time seemed like a weird pattern.

That seems unusual, to me at least.

I also get contacted regularly about all kinds of things, but not in such a pattern.

Is there something off about the tone, or the assumptions?

One never really knows where one's name has been shared, and what expectations have been formed. I have in the past felt bothered by such things without always being able to put my finger on why.

Asking for personal mentorship without an introduction or explanation certainly seems a bit weird, and I would not like it either.

Regards,

Daniele

[Markus Holtermann]

Interesting. Because I got a similar messages this morning, one on Twitter and one on LinkedIn. Here's my response:

> Hi {{ name }}. Thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately, I'm not available for outside help at this time. If you need help working on Django projects would like to suggest the django-users mailing list, the discussion forum, or the IRC channel as documented on djangoproject.com/community/ . If you are looking for mentoring working on Django itself, please use the django-core-mentorship mailing list (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/mailing-lists/#django-core-mentorship) or the discussion forum. Cheers and stay safe. Markus

Maybe that helps?

Cheers, Markus

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[Adam Johnson]

 I get about one random mentorship / free support question a week, but no cluster recently. I normally tell people no with a similar message to Markus'.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/3eeb180d-9f36-4d37-b051-93eaebb44337%40www.fastmail.com.

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Adam