Did you ever find and worked with a mentor? (other than your direct manager) Do you feel you got a lot of value of it?

When I finished University, I started as an junior Android developer with no experience and had a senior developer, that I liked to call my mentor. He was amazing, although we were taught code in university, it never really clicked. He would pair program with me and teach me all coding principles like DRY and patterns such as factories/singletons. I learnt so much from him, he was my inspiration. It helps if you really bond with the person too, if you have similar character you can learn so much.

Oh yes, definitely. At my last job I had the chance to work one-on-one with our enterprise architect a lot. We saw the world in very different ways and he scared the hell out of me at first because he seemed really intense, but I gave everything he told me to do a try and learned a lot in the process. 80% of it worked very well and I reached a point where I could explain why I disagreed with him on the other 20%. I was able to teach him to give younger technologies a chance, and he showed me why reliability was crucial with certain system elements.

If it's a good relationship, it should be mutually beneficial. You should both be growing.

absolutely, a good mentor can very easily steer you in the right direction and you could end up having similar development habits. Naturally as you progress in your career it’s also likely that one day you’re tasked with mentoring a junior and it’s good to have been in the mentee position at one point in your career

I had a mentor who is not a developer but instead was from the startup scene which was something I wanted to dive into after I had graduated from University besides going for the safe route which my classmates was going to like Big 4, MNC or government-related companies.

It was cool & awesome that he offered advice on selecting startups and what to look out for and exploring my career in the startup scene in my country.