Adewale Ogundimu

I am a staff engineer at a Toronto fintech and the first person in my family to work in technology. My parents came to Canada from Nigeria in 1992. My father was an accountant in Lagos and worked as a security guard for the first ten years in Toronto before getting his Canadian certifications. My mother was a nurse and worked her way back into nursing through the foreign-credential recognition process that takes most immigrant nurses years longer than it should. I came up watching both of them rebuild careers they had already built once. The work of building my own career was shaped by what I watched them do.

I now mentor first-generation African engineers across Canada and the broader Anglophone tech world. My typical mentee is a Black engineer one to ten years into a tech career, often the only Black engineer or one of two or three on a team of dozens, asking the same set of questions that I asked when I was at the same stage. How do I get visible without performing? How do I negotiate compensation when my parents taught me that asking for more is rude? How do I navigate promotion politics when my manager keeps telling me I am almost there and the promotion does not come?

The work is structured. We start with the brother's current situation — role, company, team, manager, the specific blockers as the brother sees them. We map what we are trying to accomplish over the next twelve to twenty-four months, with intermediate milestones. We meet every two to three weeks for the first six months and monthly after that, with the option to call more frequently when something specific is happening — a performance review, a job offer, a difficult conversation with a manager.

I am especially careful with the first-generation specifics of this work. The career conversations our parents had for us were built on the immigrant logic of stability, of not jeopardizing what you have, of not asking for too much for fear of losing it all. That logic was correct for the conditions our parents navigated. It is sometimes wrong for the conditions we navigate now. The tech industry rewards a certain kind of strategic risk-taking that our parents would have found alarming if they had been watching it. Part of the work I do is helping brothers recalibrate the risk tolerance for the actual market they are in.

Compensation transparency is a core piece of what I do. I share the specific numbers — my own compensation, the range I have negotiated in past roles, what I have seen colleagues at comparable levels make — with the brothers I mentor. That information is rare in our community and it is the single highest-leverage piece of information for most of the brothers I work with. The brothers I have helped most have walked into their next offer with actual numbers in their head and have negotiated outcomes that they would not have negotiated without that information.

I do not charge for this work. I keep a limited mentee load — six to ten active mentees at any time — and I rotate brothers through as the existing engagements complete. The decision to keep this unpaid is my own and reflects something my own first mentor did for me; I do not put the same expectation on other mentors in this field. If I am at capacity when you reach out, I will tell you and we will set up a single one-off conversation rather than an ongoing relationship, and I will refer you to other mentors who may be able to take you on.

If you are an early-career Black engineer in tech and you are reading this, write to me. Tell me where you are and what you are working on. I read every note. The first generation does not have to do all of this alone.