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Comment by christopherslee | Hacker News Reader

Specifically on the developer side of things, it's good to ask questions, but if I can answer it with lmgtfy.com then I'm going to get annoyed pretty fast, especially if you're asking me questions every 5 minutes when you can spend a little bit of time doing some research yourself. It's very valuable to me to not have to spoon feed you answers all the time.

That is not to say that there are problems that seniors shouldn't spend time mentoring junior folks on. In my experience though, some people never learned to do research on the internet in college, and almost want you to tell them how to write the code, line by line.

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I tend to encourage my juniors to ask questions.

But from time to time, I call them out when they didn't try to do any basic research. Like googling the problem or looking up docs.

Some seem to lack good re/search skills. They don't know search operators (site, filetype, etc) or the importance of keywords (eg searching: "how to add something to thingomatic" vs "thingomatic add something"). It amazes me at the lack of proper researching skills a junior may have.

I know that when I started I couldn't even begin to search because I didn't know what I was trying to search for. Eventually you learn the keywords through some trial and error and experience. The other thing is knowing which sites are better quality.

I don't have that many years under my belt but it's hit me a few times that if you can search things better than someone they seem to think you are smarter. Maybe more for the non-tech people.

You suggest that it's important for junior tech professionals to try and answer their own questions with, e.g., Google. But I feel like every other month I see somebody talking about all the bad habits developed by people who trust W3Schools as a credible resource because they're highly ranked on Google.

The junior professionals who most frequently need to find quick answers for straightforward questions are the same people who are the least well-equipped to identify which answers are credible and appropriate. It's a paradox of finding trustworthy information without consulting the only sources you know to be trustworthy, and as someone new to the field myself, I lose sleep over this stuff.

Isn't that what the code review process would be for? Let a junior developer create a solution on their own, review their work and provide constructive feedback in a way that would eventually teach them that resources like W3Schools are not to be wholly trusted?

On the flip side of the coin, there are also terrible mentors and senior developers who will gladly pass on bad habits just like W3Schools will. Independant research is a good thing.

I disagree. Juniors need the skills of looking things up on Google or they'll never develop them.

Something else: if you ask me questions, I answer them, and you keep asking the same questions, it becomes clear that you aren't actually listening or wanting to get a deep understanding of the topic. Continually asking shallow questions and not showing a desire to get better will irritate me quickly.

Probe me to get an understanding that would be difficult to find just by doing a quick documentation lookup and I'll be happy to help. But if your questions continually come from answers that were covered in the "Quick Start," god help you.

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