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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand it is indeed disappointing that nobody would help you with this. On the other hand, there's a more pro-active role you could have played yourself in this as well. "When everybody is responsible, nobody is" - what often helps is specifically asking people, by name, to sit down with you for a bit and help you get through it.

In fact, there are many social group situations in which asking specific people is far more effective than asking questions "to the group".

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If a manager of some kind were to notice the Slack messages and ping someone specific to help, that would be a perfect example of the kind of management that is so sorely lacking at so many companies. Many employees are too burned, or proud, to even put out an SOS... so a cry for help is actually a gift to management. If only it were someone’s job to think for a few minutes each day about each employee and notice if there is some small action that would help them.

Nah, let’s just alternate between micromanaging and being totally absent; fret about lack of productivity or lack of progress; maybe institute a daily stand-up.

Why not both? I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics. What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves.

Source: am a manager.

Could you please give an example of a message with more ownership? Keep in mind that he didn't know at the time that he was missing some undocumented configuration step.

Bad: "I need help with this."

Good: "Hi, Sumitra. Can you help me with this or recommend someone who can?"

Good: "Hi, $MANAGER. Can you help me with this or recommend someone who can?"

Bystander effect in a situation that is not critical is a good sign that your company culture is fucked up. That's also on management.

What kind of company or culture is that, when someone asks for help from a group and no one volunteers to even suggest to them a person that would be the best candidate to help them?

I've never been at such a company and I hope I never will.

Sometimes the person who knew how to make it all work has left. Such is the plight of the maintenance programmer.

True, but if the person who knows that code leaves, it's the manager's job to designate someone else to be responsible for that code.

One of your jobs as a manager is to debug these people issues, right? So when you get a "bug report" like "I'm stuck", you should investigate the bug and look for a solution, which might be something like "Hey Bob, Jim is having trouble getting the Frobnicator running on his machine. Can you please give him a hand with this later today? Thanks". (This assumes that Jim's SOS was issued in the first half of the day; want to make sure the issue gets resolved promptly while also not interrupting Bob's own productivity/flow.)

True- and then educate the newbie on how to ask for help.

Yes that's true, which is why I said "why not both?" The manager should do more, but so should the employee. Sitting there and saying "I'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage compared to saying "I'm blocked. Can you please help me Mr/Ms XYZ?"

The employee needs to be taught that. If they've entered the workforce without that knowledge, then it's their manager's responsibility.

I think your specification of a "correct way to report a problem" is company specific, or your personal preference, or the way that you think an ideal problem report would be stated.

We're humans. Unless there's been a training day or a Readme file explaining HOW to report a bug, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect this protocol to work:

"I'm blocked!"

"Why?"

"{reason}"

If nobody ACKs the "I'm blocked" message, it's reasonable for someone to think that nobody cares or nobody is listening. This is a normal human protocol, as used in most human environments.

"{problem}!"

"What's happening? How can I help?" (any considerate person nearby responds)

"I'm blocked because on compile I get such-and-such error message and I don't know how to fix it. Who is the right person to ask about this?"

I just cut your protocol complexity by half. ;-)

S/he wasn't proposing a protocol, but describing a naturally occurring one.

Same complexity, just less chatty.

It takes a certain kind of person to interpret ""I'm blocked" as "I'm blocked, woe is me" instead of "I'm blocked. Can anyone that sees this help me?"

Those people should never be managers.

I disagree. A manager should be skeptical to ensure everyone is pulling their weight and being truthful.

If they don't trust the employee they need to fire them.

I agree with you that employees that you cannot trust should be fired. Skepticism doesn’t necessarily mean lack of trust. It’s possible to trust dishonest people and without a skeptical view to be aware that people may be dishonest, even in small ways, it is easy to fall into that trap of trusting good liars.

You will get a lot of downvotes for making that statement here... but let me just say I agree with you 100%. The people I see that get the most work done aren’t the ones crying publicly for help on a nebulous problem, but asking very specific questions about specific problems. In cases one doesn’t make progress, escalate to the manager giving details about exactly what is going on, how many times you reached out to another team and got no answers. That gives the manager ammunition to talk to their peers on other teams or escalate to higher ups.

It’s rather unrealistic for the manager to be understanding all the time and coax a team member to give all details of every problem...

That's how I was taught (via managers on reddit actually, not irl).

Dig as far as you can, record it all, then escalate. You also have to gauge how critical it is and how much of your time (esp. if other things are building up) to spend on it as a factor of when to take it up the line.

Tbh, I haven't had any managers lately that have been that great but I'm still holding out hope.

> What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves.

> Source: am a manager.

> I'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage

As a manager, are you prepared to put your real name to these comments?

I don't see what his real name has to do with this

> As a manager, are you prepared to put your real name to these comments?

This is an anonymous public forum with a massive audience and great content. Let's keep it civil and not target individuals. Please don't try and start witch hunts to ruin someone's career just because you do not agree with him.

The way you talk makes me think you don't like people very much, which is really bad in a manager.

A new repo, likely a new employee on a new project. I have to disagree with your statement since you don't know the context at all. If all they're given is a repo with inadequate instructions, there's not much more you can do than keep asking for general help.

Comment sounds like typical 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps', meant to put down new talent, ignoring that complex, modern dev environments have many parts that are completely out of reach for newcomers without adequate onboarding.

Like you said, why not both? The employee is already asking for help, that's their part. The manager needs to come in and assist, unless he enjoys churning his dev team.

> I'm completely blocked for the last two days because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm doing absolutely nothing.

That is not asking for help. Asking for help would be "Can somebody please help me? ... rest of message here...". Even better is asking an individual (or individuals) directly.

Nonsense, this is asking for help. As a former manager of a tech team, if I had seen this I would've taken action, and as a team player individual contributor I would've taken action even if I were not a manager. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, but in my opinion you're leaning too far to try to find some way to blame this employee for processes that an employee should reasonably expect a competent management team to have solved already.

> That is not asking for help.

Say what now? Mentioning you are blocked, in a stand-up, multiple times is a cry for help. What is the point of having stand-ups if you're not assisting blocked team members?

He mentioned that he brought it up in the standup. The standup is when you announce blockers. Was no one else in the standup listening when he said he was blocked? That's when someone goes oh here is what you do.

The standup is for blockers to be announced. It's the 3 stage of the standup.

Sounds like poor management, don't blame the new guy, he did say he was blocked in standup. How is he to know who to ask. Whose time can he impinge upon. It might be he asks someone who helps him but he gets in trouble because he now took up that persons time from something else.

The manager should see oh he is blocked, I'll assign so and so to help unblock him.

Only the most dense of people would think that isn't a cry for help.

"I'm blocked" is the strongest type of distress signal in terms of workflow. If you don't investigate that, what else would you investigate ?

This person probably DID ask more specific questions. They were just describing the gist if the interaction. Not a literal copy paste of the exact messages.

Having my blockers completely ignored for a significant amount of time was a major factor in deciding to find a new job. There are only so many times you can beg for libraries, source code, permissions and other essential tools before coming to a conclusion that maybe somewhere else there is a place where you don't have to deal with this bullshit.

I don’t see the reason to assume that was litterally the entire message posted to the channel, it seems more likely OP just pharaphrased what they actually said when the made that commen on a public discussion board.

When someone under-performs, I always look at who they report to. Nobody wants to perform poorly. Typically the lead / manager has given inadequate guidance, or there is a serious skill set mismatch, both of which are on the lead / manager.

Sometimes it's on me.

Source: I manage managers

Few days later note - "wanting to perform poorly" is basically what ADHD looks to other people.

> Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves.

I just want to point out that that is a lot of assumption based on the limited (probably paraphrased) context we have here.

You should stop being a manager. Or get training to become a better one. Seriously.

When a member of your team can't perform because he's not given the proper resources(access, help, info, etc), it should be your number 1 job to find out why is that the case and do everything in your power to rectify that.

One could argue that it's your only job actually.

I’m not repeating exact conversations, people or problems for obvious reasons.

You can bet I was a hell more specific about both the problem and who should help me.

I've worked at different companies that just culturally have very different approaches. Where I am now, I will basically corner people until they help me or provide a better option on where to seek the help I need. At my previous employer, there were certain mailing lists where you could ask questions and if your questions reflected real effort, you could expect helpful responses.

Nitpick s/he said s/he couldn’t run the repo. If someone posted that in our slack someone would jump in and ask what errors s/he was getting. Once we found a solution we would get the docs updated, usually by the person who found the problem since they have the most context.

People ask for help in different ways based on personality, skill set and experience. It’s more important to meet them where they are than sit back and smugly suggest they lack individual ownership.

> I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics.

You actually expected that what I wrote was a literal quote from the only thing I ever said during those days? It probably was something more like:

"Tried to run project X but kept getting error Y. I tried to figure out where it comes from but it seems to missing some kind of value it pulls from somewhere. Tried every step in the README and installed twice. I think the information in the README is incomplete and there's another step. Nobody else had to use this repo before here so the guys here can't help me out either. Can you help me out @colleagueFromTheUS1 or @colleagueFromTheUS2?"

After 48 hours I get very specific about being completely blocked and that I have exhausted every way thinkable to get it running. So nobody would be living in the fantasy the problem was going away by just ignoring it long enough.

If only it were someone’s job to think for a few minutes each day about each employee and notice if there is some small action that would help them.

This is very good- something managers should do for all of their direct reports. If not every day, then often.

This is similar in emergency situations. When you need somebody to call 911, don't ever say "Somebody please call 911!". You have to look at someone, point at them, and tell them "I need you to call 911". Most people will either stand in shock or think that someone else is on it.

> Most people will either stand in shock or think that someone else is on it.

The bystander effect is real, but I wouldn't expect to see it in organisations with explicit hierarchies. Can you imagine this happening in the armed forces? If this happens under your watch as a leader, you're not good at leading.

It occurs in explicit hierarchies all the time. Watch the opening scene in "Saving Private Ryan." Most of the troops are scared shitless, waiting for someone to tell them what the hell to do. And these were troops who had been trained for 3 years before hitting Normandy.

I like that the problem is remote specific, and the first image you have is “asking people, by name, to sit down with you”. Your image is nit wrong, but a symptom of how we can be hardwired for physical proximity.

Otherwise, a common issue for a team with colocated workers mixed with remote workers is a facility to ignore calls and messages.

Central people get easily overworked, interrupted and drown into tsunamis of requests. One of the coping mechanisms in these situations is to just ignore most requests, and only deal with people getting loud enough to be heard. In a mixed environment, the coworker siting 10m away has an easier time grabbing attention than the icon in the chat room with a unread badge.

Even simply knowing when someone is taking breaks can help to time requests to get them at the right moment.

I have remote days every now and then, and it’s interesting to see how the game is completely different, and how often I end up asking someone physically there to go talk to people on my behalf.

I agree that remote is more difficult than physical, but it's still much easier to ignore a general comment in a chatroom than one that's specifically addressed to you. Most chat applications will even highlight lines mentioning your name.

(Note that being remote in an otherwise physical team makes this significantly more complicated as well.)

It's good you pointed this out because many people don't know. I took a first aid class and they taught us in an emergency situation, never say "somebody call 911!" Because everybody will think someone else will do it. Point to a specific person and say "you, call 911!"

It's the same thing.

>In fact, there are many social group situations in which asking specific people is far more effective than asking questions "to the group".

CPR for example. It's one of the primary tenants. Assign individual responsibility to people to ensure this group paralysis doesn't happen.

This is a big challenge for remote employees. At some point when do you just give up and settle for what you can get done and not worry about what you cannot change. Its a poor attitude but it happens at a lot of companies.

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