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Comment by MadBohr | Hacker News Reader

> I'm completely blocked for the last two days because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm doing absolutely nothing.

That is not asking for help. Asking for help would be "Can somebody please help me? ... rest of message here...". Even better is asking an individual (or individuals) directly.

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Nonsense, this is asking for help. As a former manager of a tech team, if I had seen this I would've taken action, and as a team player individual contributor I would've taken action even if I were not a manager. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, but in my opinion you're leaning too far to try to find some way to blame this employee for processes that an employee should reasonably expect a competent management team to have solved already.

> That is not asking for help.

Say what now? Mentioning you are blocked, in a stand-up, multiple times is a cry for help. What is the point of having stand-ups if you're not assisting blocked team members?

He mentioned that he brought it up in the standup. The standup is when you announce blockers. Was no one else in the standup listening when he said he was blocked? That's when someone goes oh here is what you do.

The standup is for blockers to be announced. It's the 3 stage of the standup.

Sounds like poor management, don't blame the new guy, he did say he was blocked in standup. How is he to know who to ask. Whose time can he impinge upon. It might be he asks someone who helps him but he gets in trouble because he now took up that persons time from something else.

The manager should see oh he is blocked, I'll assign so and so to help unblock him.

"I'm blocked" is the strongest type of distress signal in terms of workflow. If you don't investigate that, what else would you investigate ?

This person probably DID ask more specific questions. They were just describing the gist if the interaction. Not a literal copy paste of the exact messages.

Having my blockers completely ignored for a significant amount of time was a major factor in deciding to find a new job. There are only so many times you can beg for libraries, source code, permissions and other essential tools before coming to a conclusion that maybe somewhere else there is a place where you don't have to deal with this bullshit.

Only the most dense of people would think that isn't a cry for help.

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