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Comment by PureParadigm | Hacker News Reader

I think this can definitely save you time in some cases, but usually at the expense of other people. For example, if someone asks me for help on something because I'm more familiar with it, my spending five minutes to answer their question might save them an hour of troubleshooting. Here, the Napoleon technique would save me time but only by wasting the other person's time. Eventually this might come back to bite me, perhaps if that other person is now an hour behind on a task that helps me.

And from the perspective of someone asking for help, it can also be really frustrating to not get a response. Slow responses give the impression that the other person is not paying attention. Any sort of reply, even a quick "I'll follow-up by the end of the day" is much better than no response at all. This shows people that you're listening and that they can trust/count on you.

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Responding to every message/request with a "I'll get back to you by X" takes you away from the task you were otherwise doing. This may not matter, but it's often yet another diversion. Most of us are paid/valued on the basis we can do sustained work and responding to adhoc queries is only a small part of that.

I think there is a peril in responding immediately (which I tend to do) - you set a weird informal SLA that people then expect you to meet. I've had people call me and say "Hey I emailed you this morning - are you ignoring me?" - they're kind of joking but not really.

It's tough to balance. I agree with you - sometimes, me spending five minutes not only saves someone else an hour, it saves me hours later on when I have to unpick something someone else has done. The skill is trying to identify those critical points without interrupting what you're doing every time you get a mail/IM/whatever. A good team helps with that.

That's why you don't respond immediately. My policy is that if it's super important they'll either come by my office or they'll call me directly.

Anything else, and it gets looked at during specific times of the day. Once everyone is aware of this policy, they know that emailing me won't get an immediate response, and they accept that.

I've met a few people who do this. Out of interest, what times of the day do you use for email?

morning and after lunch. Sometimes if I have downtime at the end of the day and don't want to start something else up then at the end of the day as well.

> if someone asks me for help on something because I'm more familiar with it, my spending five minutes to answer their question might save them an hour of troubleshooting.

Sure, but allowing them to take that shortcut can also be taken to encourage them not to think, to prompt them into asking next time as well and deprives them of a learning opportunity. Since memories form best with an emotional connection, a tough debugging session might be a better teacher than your five minutes.

This brings up a related question, though: to what degree are we responsible for colleagues' evolution? For me, there's a lot of grey area between people/competence manager and just being a team player in the true sense.

Question I ask is "What have you tried?" and "What happened differently to what you expected?" gets junior engineers to at least have a go.

It can be frustrating, but it's also frustrating if people ask without thinking what this might mean for your own routine. At the end of the day you won't get promoted for not getting your own work done while helping others and people tend to be very inconsiderate if you let them.

At Google one of the early engineers had a handbook on communicating with him, e.g., when to send an e-mail, schedule a meeting, send an instant message. I think this makes sense.

For me for example I think an e-mail should have content (an answer to a question, not a reply that I'll look at it) and I'll reply when I think is appropriate as long as there is no explicit deadline. An instant message might not get a reply at all if it's outside of my time zone or I'm working on something, best to follow up, if an e-mail needs an estimate when to expect a reply, ask for it.

On the other side, I think it makes sense to be as considerate as possible when asking for something, to make sure to get a reply, try not to waste other people's time and try to be as concise as possible.

Edit: one more thing that really helps getting a good reply: if possible tell the recipient what’s in it for them to invest their time.

> at the end of the day you won't get promoted for not getting your own work done while helping others and people tend to be very inconsiderate if you let them.

This depends on the team. I’ve been promoted to manage a team because “we have observed that everyone that has a problem they cannot solve themselves walks over to your desk and you take the time to answer.” Your individual capacity for work may drop, but the teams efficiency can still grow at the same time.

Good point, this is probably my experience at a FANG talking, I was like that early in my career, based on my experience at university where it was mutually beneficial to support others. All things equal I didn't get promoted any faster than the others so I adapted my behaviour. What you experienced is what good management should actually look for, in my case that showed that the team and company goals were strongly misaligned with my personal goals.

Outside of big corporate I've seen more value in helping others, though it still makes sense to evaluate if someone is repeatedly taking up time without returning the favour when the situation arises.

To be clear, I don't think it's good to ignore people, but I think it's important to show boundaries, if someone wants something, they should be considerate and have fair expectations. A well written request considering my situation would very likely get a quick reply.

Exactly this! Many, in particular SW devs, are very concerned with not being interrupted, because it lowers their productivity. But in my opinion, you should optimize for team productivity, not your own productivity. That can for example mean taking 5 minutes to answer a question that they could find out for themselves with a few hours of digging through the code.

Makes sense, it's the main value of working together (and going to the office back in the day), but make sure to reward this behavior.

> Slow responses give the impression that the other person is not paying attention. Any sort of reply, even a quick "I'll follow-up by the end of the day" is much better than no response at all. This shows people that you're listening and that they can trust/count on you.

Different communication styles and the fact that these communication modes are new to humans and we therefore don't have an actual common understanding of netiquette, I guess

I generally only reply when I have a good answer. Which might be 2-3 days later. And I don't sweat chasing people for a follow-up until a couple of days later unless I signified explicitly that it's very urgent to me (unless it's customer service/support kind of thing where they explicitly give expectations otherwise)

If you don't indicate you need this information NOW, why would I drop everything else I'm doing to answer you?

>Here, the Napoleon technique would save me time but only by wasting the other person's time.

The premise is that your time is way more valuable than somebody else's. And they're wasting it.

That assumes I'm much more valuable to the team than the other person. Real life has not many Napoleons though...

> For example, if someone asks me for help on something because I'm more familiar with it, my spending five minutes to answer their question might save them an hour of troubleshooting. Here, the Napoleon technique would save me time but only by wasting the other person's time.

Other people learning new stuff is not a waste of time.

I think there's certain hubris in wanting to be the person who has helped.

Maybe I was not the first on the list to ask for help. Maybe I am not the last. Maybe someone else will explain it better and quicker. Perhaps I underestimate how easily the person in trouble can find a good resource online and, indeed, learn from it. (Maybe they underestimate themselves, too!)

I suffer from this tendency myself. It often feels nice to be helpful.

> my spending five minutes to answer their question might save them an hour of troubleshooting

It's definitely situational, but there's also a "teach a man to fish" effect playing out in some cases.

If it's somebody on my team who will continue to deal with the same class of issues, I'd prefer they "waste" an hour debugging. Chances are I did at some point in the past, and that's why I can answer in 5 minutes.

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