Good thread. Thanks everyone. I think people should have done some minimum on Exercism before mentoring. I think solving an exercise other than “Hello World” is probably an absolute minimum thing to have done.
Another idea might be asking someone to have some minimum reputation (e.g. 5 - which they would get through publishing 2-5 solutions). This acts as effectively the same barrier as above but means someone most be willing to publish their code, which I think is also a reasonable thing to ask an a potential mentor to do.
I do not remember exactly how/when I became mentor, but it likely was after solving quite a few exercises and also after getting mentored a few times (which gave me confidence that yes, I can be a mentor).
I just checked and it looks like I have never been mentored in my main mentoring language. I do not think this is a problem. Besides, ‘fixing’ this might not be feasible for lack of mentors.
Kinda obvious, but for the record: I agree.
Do you have recordings of how people came to be mentors? Like how many exercises they had solved beforehand, whether they had been mentored, etc.
Potential problems with using reputation:
Getting a spelling fix PR merged gets you +12 reputation already
I do not expect correlation (+ nor -) between publish-happiness and mentor-suitability
