My flight is delayed. I'm in the Plaza Premium Lounge at Mactan-Cebu International Airport, Terminal 2, corner window seat, claimed the moment I walked in. Windrose is blasting in my ears: "Diggy Diggy Hole," if you're curious. There's a gin and tonic on the armrest. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, an Eva Air A330 in full Sanrio livery sits directly in front of me, pastels and cartoon characters in the equatorial light. The Hello Kitty section is hidden behind a jetway. Beside me, a DHL Air Hong Kong A330, its tail an almost absurd yellow.

I've been in the Philippines for three weeks, and the wifi has been, without exaggeration, the worst I've encountered in recent memory.

I have spent enough time in leadership to know the standard story.

In that version, you start technical. You move into management. You become strategic. If all goes well, you eventually stop touching the technical work except at a safe rhetorical distance. Your value is supposed to migrate upward into vision, people, budgets, and influence.

When people talk about mentorship, they usually focus on what the mentee gets: advice, support, perspective, encouragement, access.

All of that matters. But it's only half the story.

I've mentored engineers who became executives. I've also mentored engineers who would have been better served by a different approach from me — giving advice when they needed space, or autonomy when they needed direction.

I used to own a knitting shop. This is perhaps the most unexpected sentence I could write in a piece about technology leadership, so let me explain why it belongs here.