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> - if you must ask questions, convince yourself you must not, just figure it out instead

God, this one hurts. In the first couple months at my new role (which I intentionally chose to be one that would stretch and challenge me as I'm looking for some professional growth), a senior member of my team expressed the view that he'd rather someone spend three days researching than ask him a thirty-second question. When I was already insecure about my position in the team and not wanting to appear incompetent, this has ironically sent me into a spiral of being _less_ capable and productive because I'm fearfully avoiding asking for any context or guidance. I'm struggling to break that cycle, but it's hard.

3 days? Wow. Can't say I think much of this senior member of your team, who seems to be the anti-social one here. I'm sure it breaks flow for them, but a big part of being senior is amplifying the best in those less so, and helping them improve.

3 minutes, 30 minutes, sure, I've discovered a lot of junior folks would figure things out on their own when I couldn't get back to them immediately, and tended to add some delay just to encourage trying a little harder before contacting me. I would say even 3 hours has value. Buy yourself a rubber duck and have a heart-to-heart about your problem.

3 days is going to result in lots of folks getting stuck in local minima, likely confusing themselves in the process. To be clear, sometimes a problem requires a deep dive, or there is no one who can provide useful help. Even then, some guidance just to get outside perspective is helpful.

Pre-internet/stackoverflow, pre-AI... I'd easily spend 3 days working out how to solve a problem that I hadn't seen before. Asking others generally didn't help anyway because they hadn't seen it either. So, if that was the formative experience of the senior person, I could understand where that attiude was coming from.

Today, yeah 3 days is a long time to spend researching and spinning your wheels. But it's still the best way to learn.

> Asking others generally didn't help anyway because they hadn't seen it either.

Fair, and there are certainly some kinds of problem for which asking questions is unlikely to help because it's untrodden ground; and for learning skills, answers are indeed less useful than practice.

But that's not the only kind of problem to be encountered. As sibling commenters point out, questions like "hey, why did we pick Azure over AWS (and is that likely to change at any point soon?)" are questions that _no_ amount of research is going to resolve, because the answer _only_ lives in people's heads. That's not about _learning_, it's about going to the right source for the information.

I would argue it depends on the context. Of course, gaining enough experience on which contexts are worth persevering for which duration is it's own thing.

The rubric I give to juniors is a bit more simple: if you get stuck, consider alternatives that you haven't tried out. Alternatives are of a few types including: relevant evidence/facts you can gather that you haven't yet gathered, and attempts you haven't tried yet. As long as you have alternatives keep trying them (gather evidence, make attempts). Once you run out of alternatives then seek help (avoid spinning wheels).

This way when a junior comes to me I can ask them to list the alternatives they have already tried. If they haven't tried obvious alternatives (gathered facts and reasonable attempts) I send them back. If they've tried all the alternatives I can think of then I get involved.

I'll note that this tends to work when contact between team members is relatively frequent (e.g. once a day) so I can get a sense of how long the junior has been working on a task to avoid rabbit-holing.

I think with regards to new hires, go for the quick question up front every time. Onboarding people fast is an investment with high-ROI.

It's a really bad sign if someone keeps asking thirty second questions three or six months into the job and hasn't figured out how to answer those themselves yet.

It's a really bad sign if they keep asking you the same questions.

But when someone's new? It's your job to help them get up to speed. A thirty second question is probably something like "is there a reason we use Azure instead of AWS" or "do you want me to use library A or B, I see both in the codebase," not something that they'll benefit from diving into for three days.

more importantly there should be a time once a day where asking is not a disruption. you are not in the flow for 3 days in a row. we used the daily standup for this. or any break time.

Financial services?

My threshold is typically an hour. And this is after all the onboarding and pairing with them for a few features. I throw a month of just interrupt me whenever you need to at any new hire as a lead on a five or so team size on line of business apps. Three days sounds ridiculous for someone to spin and be stuck. That's a huge waste of money and a sign of deep problems imo.

In fact, I'd prefer to discuss sooner than let a new dev on their own for more than a day of work. Discussion brings alignment and saves me time with micro adjustments rather than massive corrections or debates and push back when someone goes off on their own for a long time.

> And this is after all the onboarding and pairing with them for a few features

Hahaha. Yeah. This same guy was meant to be my onboarding buddy - I only found that out after ~5 months. I didn't get any onboarding or pairing.

> a senior member of my team expressed the view that he'd rather someone spend three days researching than ask him a thirty-second question

I have never met a senior that would dare to take such a stance; he may be willing to learn, but we will not both cover his knowledge gap and improve his own cv at the company expense. I have no idea if you are competent or not, but it doesnt really matter if you are the one deciding. Its not a democracy, and sure as hell its not amateur day. He will do as he is told, or he will find a more suitable team elsewhere. Have no tolerance for divas, they bring zero value.

Yeah I was just thinking I’d PIP someone who repeatedly expressed that attitude.

I’m pretty confident the narrative in his mind is as follows:

1. All the learning that has stuck with me was painful

2. All my most painful learning was done without help

3. Therefore, painless assistance won’t drive learning

And tbh that isn’t exactly wrong.

As others have noted, this is avoidant behavior, not anti-social.

Worth taking a look at the Wikipedia for Attachment styles [1]. The two types are Dismissive-Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant. Either can be superficially mistaken for anti-social, although Dismissive-avoidant tends to present a bit closer to anti-social.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_in_adults

I thought attachment theory was debunked

This is closer to my internal thoughts as well, though I would say these thoughts fall more into "avoidant" than "antisocial".

I think you are mixing up asocial and anti-social. Anti-social basically means you don't care how others feel, their rights and social norms. Asocial means you don't want to engage socially.

And I'm pretty sure you are describing yourself as someone with an inferiority complex and social anxiety.

> I am guessing the author is either criticizing people who are anti-social (in the pop culture definition) or believes he was before and after some thinking arrived at the conclusion that antisociety was not the way. But I don't feel it describes my internal motivations, so I've translated them to my behaviors:

I think there's quite a diversity in anti-social behaviors. He may not be describing you, but he's definitely describing others: difficult, self-centered people, probably with anger problems, isolated (because they're unpleasant to deal with) but not self-isolating.

Strangely I would bucket about half of these in Good or at least Often Useful behaviors.

Good:

- if someone is confusing or upsetting you, assume it is your fault (personal accountability)

- interpret others' actions in the context of your fears (at least having awareness of your fears is step one, step two is reacting healthily)

- assume your assumptions are wrong and that you shouldn't even bother (just delete the "shouldn't even bother" part)

- pivot conversations when someone asks you about something you actually know or are good at, it might be a trick, tell them you're dumb instead (playing dumb CAN be a smart thing, or at least not one-upping someone else nor making them feel small for no good reason)

- if you must ask questions, convince yourself you must not, just figure it out instead (diving into something can prevent procrastination, you can start and ask questions later)

- when all hope is lost in conversation, pretend to take their side to end the conversation ("smile and nod" can be great advice- the pro-social doctrine is "you can't win an argument and keep a relationship at the same time")

Bad:

- dig in your heels at no point in time whatsoever and just tell people the minimum they need to hear so they leave

- do not develop narratives or it means you will have an immediate network

- do not research the acumen or credentials of anyone

- do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, they might actually be wrong and you're not a judge

- do not seek to understand anyone at all

The motivation behind what you've classified 'good' is bad, you've just twisted the symptoms to appear good, while the underlying motivation and root cause is bad.

Unfortunately the parent is suffering from a complete lack of self confidence, and even telling them to go to a therapist won't help as they never will.

Seen it IRL, even if they book an appointment, they'll convince themselves there's some good reason not to go. The two people I've met with it both somehow convinced themselves that therapy didn't work without ever trying it. To the point of lecturing me, who has been to therapy and found it helped immensely, at how useless it is.

It really seems to be a nefarious affliction.

Reading that list above is like watching a car crash in slow motion. You desperately want to help them, they could have so much of a better life if they just believed in themselves even a little bit, but they won't listen to you.

One of my friends I once asked 'Do you want me to push you any morez or is it better if we just talk about other things?'. They dejectedly admitted that they found being pushed depressing and preferred if we didn't talk about it any more.

One of the funniest, insightful people I know, with a great talent, is working a warehouse job and we meet and talk and have a great time but we now talk about anything but his failure to launch.

Ditto for a CERN physicist that now is a part-time tutor for high schoolers living at home with his parents.

I developed from a very early age a sort of "always assume the worst about yourself" mentality.

I think part of it was influenced by social media (I was a tween debatelord). Part of it was self improvement (only focus on yourself! get ahead! never blame the enviornment!). Part of it was genuinely depressing things in my life.

As an example, I was obsessed with "finding my passion" at some point. Looking back, I was looking for a way to say, "This thing I'm committed to is way more important than all the other things in my life, so I don't need to go do them". As another example, frequently I would go into epistemic spirals - I was aware of psychoanalysis, so clearly there's capability for deep self delusion. But how do I know the navel gazing isn't self delusion? How do I know framing it as "navel gazing" is not an attempt to cope? And infinite recursion ensues. Another example is constantly feeling like I needed to steelman opponents, and so I would do the utmost research and understand the "best" arguments for the opponent's side before responding.

Incidentally, I think this is why I loved computer science so much - because you often proved worst case guarantees. I had a deep disdain for heuristic solutions.

But this mentality is still bad. Let's take the steelman example. How could steelmanning your opponent possibly be a bad thing? Well, are you actually steelmanning them, or are you trying to find some sort of greater upper bound to their argument, then attacking that... for what? Efficiency? Feeling secure in yourself? Why not actually listen to them? Oh, but surely if they accept premises A, B, C, then D, E, F must follow! Do they, though? Is it possible they could not go down that route, and for valid reasons?

It's still a deep contradiction I work through, since to me personally, all of these things invoke a deep "you are not being remotely rational or moral" gut feeling when I do go down those routes. But I know that I need to sit more in grey zones and just.... live in the grey.

(I still love formal computer science and dislike heuristics. But it's much more balanced now.)

Oh and I should mention, the desire to hear everybody out too. Incidentally, on the first few times I had these types of revalations, of course I would go and completely go extreme in the opposite way.

Ah, life is complicated.

Apropos of nothing, “I was a tween debatelord” sounds like a b-movie title

Curious, which app/ forum/ subreddit/ group were you a tween debatelord on, and in what years? (got a link, so we can see?) To what extent did your formation depend on that crowd and its cultural values?

> pivot conversations when someone asks you about something you actually know or are good at, it might be a trick, tell them you're dumb instead

Spot on, can relate to that :)

Detachment and Flourishing - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181/lecture-8

I mean, some of these are legitimate stragety to surviving corp America.