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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

I solved this problem, quite well, and still do this all the damn time:

1) try to solve the problem

2) Gee, it's hard. shit. okay think think think

3) okay ask for help. wait... let's write a slack message. First write the problem, explain exactly what you tried, and ideas for next attempts. Explain your confusions.

4) OMG I SOLVED IT

4a) Hit send.

I find that 70% of the time, I don't hit send. 30% of the time it was worth asking.

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I have an additional trick - If you are the person of whom help is frequently asked, employ a nominal delay before you get into it.

"Sure - let's get on <conference line> in 5 minutes"

I've found this to work well. "hang on I'm going to try 1 more thing". And, then you don't hear from them until tomorrow.

I use this trick a lot. I tend to vary between 10-20 minutes though.

I also usually give them a starting point.

"Hey I'm in the middle of something. I can chat in 15 minutes or so. In the meantime if you haven't yet, try X, Y, Z"

This helps push them to at least try something so when I ask later "Did you try X Y or Z?" They can have some kind of answer.

I found this in a non-development role, this lady would constantly phone me for 'help' and I found that if I just ignored her (in a nice way) she'd fix it herself in a few minutes.

brilliant idea. i will use this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

When I was young in the pre-Slack era when you actually had to find a colleague physically to explain the problem to, this was called "cardboard engineer syndrome"; i.e., talking to a cardboard cutout of a colleague would have been just as effective.

I know this as rubber ducking. Explain your problem to a "rubber duck" on your desk. It doesn't have to be a real rubber duck.

But it's funnier if it is.

You can also use an infant. Now that my youngest is two years old this doesn't work any more.

On step 3, explaining exactly what you tried and ideas for next attempts is crucial! I've never heard of an engineer that took the time to communicate those points and still get rebuffed for help.

I work alone, but I can’t count the number of github issues I typed but never opened because of this.

Before slack, Stackoverflow was my rubber ducky.

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