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Comment by cke | Hacker News Reader

This one hits home for me.

Early on in my career, I had a "mentor" tell me to try it on my own before asking any questions only to swear under his breath when I messed up. It was a massive source of anxiety balancing between asking a question and the risk of messing up.

When working with junior engineers nowadays, I go out of my way to let them know that any question at any time is acceptable. I'll put down what I'm doing and help them through a problem and then celebrate the solution with them. I never want them to feel the fear of work and failure that I did.

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Agreed, but with the caveat of not making every single problem you encounter become your team's or your manger's problem. I've seen this especially with some interns, where given the (valid) advice of not being afraid to ask questions, go overboard and make every single task they might have everyone else's task as well.

Sure, that happens. But that's pretty easy to deal with. Just tell them before they start asking for help, they have to at least do some thinking about the problem. The explicit 1 hour time frame in the article is a great guideline.

There is a difference when you say look for "at-most an hour" and "at-least an hour" before reaching out.

By Jove, I think you've got it!

I'm not saying "do not bother me before precisely 60 minutes have passed," but just "go spend some time with this before you start pulling in other people, but also do not hesitate to pull someone else in if you've made literally no progress in about an hour."

I have junior engineers try solving their problem on their own for an hour. If they make no progress, ask for help. If they make some progress, repeat. I think it's a good learning experience while also providing a safety net, and I've gotten positive feedback from juniors on this advice.

> When working with junior engineers nowadays, I go out of my way to let them know that any question at any time is acceptable. I'll put down what I'm doing and help them through a problem and then celebrate the solution with them. I never want them to feel the fear of work and failure that I did.

I go even further than that. I tell juniors there's literally no way you can screw anything up so badly that we can't deal with it. If they write code that doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and it's not caught in code review, the reviewers are more to blame than they are, because they're supposed to know better. A junior shouldn't have the access level necessary to do something like drop the production database -- that's on their more experienced colleagues to set up those guard rails.

Maybe this is a cultural thing, but did you ask what you were doing wrong when they swore?

For me, if somebody swore about something I was doing, I’d likely laugh and challenge them to either ask how I’d fucked up or how they’d recommend doing it.

I had a hard case of impostor syndrome at my first full-time job and spent an unnecessary amount of time being stuck because I was too scared to ask.

I make sure that anyone in my office who is new or is my junior knows that I’m the person they can always interrupt. People never interrupt too much.

>Early on in my career, I had a "mentor" tell me to try it on my own before asking any questions only to swear under his breath when I messed up

May I ask how long ago this was? Although shit colleagues and shit workplaces still exist, it feels like these days it would be shut down pretty quick by HR in the average company.

I have seen HR get involved in situations like this zero time in my career. I wouldn't want them to either.

That depends IMO. Is the "mentor" really the "manager?" If someone with power over your performance evaluations and future at the company is swearing under their breath every time you do something wrong, that's a problem that HR maybe should be involved in.

HR is not there to solve your problems. HR is there to protect the company.

It's fine to be friendly with HR (some wonderful people work there), but remember who is paying them and whose interests they are supposed to look out for first. Definitely not yours.

HR wants all the info they can get from you. They will cheerfully listen to everything you tell them. And then they will do their job, which is to analyze the situation for potential risks around legal exposure, and take steps to mitigate those risks.

I would basically never bring HR in to a problem unless you are very confident that solving your problem and the goal of protecting the company are truly in alignment. Maybe retraining the manager is better for the company, but who knows. They can also solve their problem by removing the new employee who is being treated badly.

A hostile work environment is the company's problem.

Someone who needs to be on a performance plan expects HR to force coworkers to be more patient? Sounds about right

What are you on about with "performance plans" and such?

Call me skeptical. In 20 years, I've only seen HR only get involved for hiring and firing. You'll be lucky to hear from them for anything else, maybe for benefits renewal or a DEI seminar.

HR is not your friend, unless you work in management or above.

HR is not intervening in lows stakes ordinary day to day conflicts, power struggles or personality clashes such as this one. Nor are they able to.

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