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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

You're demonstrating why people become afraid to ask questions, and stop doing so even when they should.

I'd much rather have someone ask when they get stuck, or even if they're kinda stuck. If someone happens to ask me a question that's easily found via poking around a bit more, I'll show them how they could have found the answer, and then they'll have learned two things: the thing they wanted to know and a new pattern for solving problems.

As a result, I rapidly find myself surrounded by people who ask smarter and smarter questions, and who can solve harder and harder problems. And I love that result.

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Somewhat inexperienced team leader here. IMO, working on improving the team's knowledge as a whole is so much more rewarding than working on your own knowledge and snapping at people who want you to share it.

The style I favor when the junior devs ask me questions is to ask questions right back at them, kind of like in a Socratic dialogue. This makes them reluctant to come to me for easy answers and think more about the problem first.

In the end I get a team of people with steadily improving skills to whom I can delegate ever more complex tasks.

Thanks for this

Ironically enough, it's always been the same people who snap about being bothered with questions, who are the first to go running for help when they are confused by something outside their domain of expertise.

That's been my experience at least. My very first job was especially bad. There was an entire culture built up where tech leads and senior engineers would never answer chats/emails sent by junior engineers. If you really needed a clarification, you had to hunt them down in their cube, where if you're lucky, they would answer your question without any condescension. At my very first performance review, I was even dinged for "asking too many questions."

At the time, I thought there was something wrong with me. Looking back, the reason why I had to ask so many questions was because there was zero documentation, the code base was horrific, and we were using stone age tooling. My only regret is that I hadn't left even earlier than I did.

I've had a similar experience where I joined a new company, worked for four weeks, had a performance review, and was told that I had lost the confidence of my coworkers and if I don't improve my productivity, I'd have to be let go in a month. I quit immediately.

I was contributing from day one. I had introduced unit tests to their code. I implemented a Stripe integration for subscriptions. I added new features. After receiving one of my questions, the senior dev would take a long hard look at me, thinking of the dickest thing to say, then he'd say it. The responses were always condescending and rarely helpful. I became afraid to interact with him.

No matter what I did, I did it the wrong way. He didn't offer solutions, just criticism. When I mentioned that working with this guy was incredibly difficult, my employer said that he understands, but this individual is so good at what he does, it's just something they'll have to deal with. Life is too short to deal with these toxic individuals.

As long as they dont keep asking the same question over again... Now that does get annoying.

My experience is that people not asking questions when they should is far less common than not taking the time to think when they should. I've found most people's response to a challenging problem is to ask someone for an answer rather than take the time to use their brain and solve it themselves. This might frequently be the fastest way to solve the problem, but there is tremendous value in learning to apply yourself and tackle challenges; it also results in a greater diversity of solutions.

Worse is when they tell you your code doesn't work. Spend half an hour "debugging" it only to find its their code that is the problem.

>then they'll have learned two things

I used to do that. What would happen is people learn they _dont need_ to poke, because this sucker has all the answers on a platter, so why bother.

What I would prefer, is somebody who tries to figure it out themselves, even if it takes more time ... just maybe I don't have the answers and would like somebody to give me information for a change rather than just take take take ...

I think there is a balance somewhere.

I once talked to a teacher about that problem. He told me that most of the time it's hard to tell what is the right balance between giving the answer or pointing towards the answer, if you do it too early you kill the opportunity for some one to improve their knowledge acquisition process or simply their cognitive ability to reason about a complex subject(or more often, a subject they are not familiar with).

However, if you intervene too late you can make a student go on his way for too looking for an answer that's too complex(for the time frame given to solve the problem) or that's in wrong direction(like trying to optimize a small part of a project that's not all that important) or even more commonly, the student can remain oblivious regarding a shortcut that can make his life a lot easier.

I always think of those problems when dealing with a new intern and I'm still unsure on how to deal with it, but one thing I'm starting to understand is that different people have different personalities(that are constantly changing), so they require different approaches at different moments

Indeed there is, and I'm just providing a counterbalancing opinion.

As the man says "there is no silver bullet".

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