Self-Managing People Are Smart about Asking for Help

You should think about the cost of asking for help before you actually do it. Or ask it in a medium that allows for an async conversation. Take a measure of how others ask questions or ask where most of the discussions take place (I have only been in face-to-face driven places but it's not hard to imagine Slack-driven places).

On most days, this will be fine, but getting tunnel vision and not being aware of what's happening and asking silly javascript questions during important deployments or production work will rub people the wrong way.

Your colleagues are not there to simply serve the "smartest and most talented people that just know how to ask questions".

"Every Olympian has a coach"

I like to do things by myself, but the quote above I heard a few years ago and really changed the way I think about asking for help.

I could have used this advice 10 years ago. This is a great article to pass on to folks new to the working world. I don't know what other working environments are like, but I appreciate people that keep the venting to a minimum. You can easily frame yourself as the complainer, deserved or not, if you use this one too much.

Definitely need to remind myself to ask more questions, but not lazy ones, thanks.

But "ask" is a verb, not a noun, sheesh.

This is great advice for both managers and employees alike! I was told this a long time ago, "good employees come to managers with solutions, not problems." It has propelled me to be a self-managed person and it really puts me in a place of making quality contributions to the good of the company. I think this is especially important in development because if you ask for help whenever you get blocked, your coworkers have to solve all of your hard problems! This means that you don't relieve any pain from your team. However, if you instead say, "I have 3 possible solutions, what do you think about them?" , or "can you tell me the way you'd do this?" , then you can deal with the hard problems without taking up too much of your coworkers time.