Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

It depends and it’s a balance. Too many questions is a bad sign because it means they aren’t investing time into solving problems on their own (like math, try for 3 minutes give up and look at the back of the book).

The nice thing about Slack/Zoom combo is that if you have a highly self-directed engineer and a self-starter then they can spend time working until they truly feel stuck and then connect and share code snippets and do screen shares and calls. Instead of everything having to be a “stop the world” Q/A session you get a nice async communication channel that allows for various levels of triage.

That being said I certainly find in-person collaboration to be very valuable, but not so valuable as to drive a car and sit in an office where I can’t wear sweatpants or get up whenever I want to make an espresso or run an errand if I’m stuck on a problem for a bit.

View on HN

In my experience, there’s no such thing as too many questions, so long as they’re of good quality.

The best intern I’ve ever had was would hit me every single morning with a laundry list of questions, but, crucially they were almost 100% things she didn’t yet have the tools or context to find out on her own.

By the end she was asking me questions I hadn’t even thought to ask

I think there is. Asking for things you can look up how to do on the Internet just isn’t a good question, for example. (Like something generic like how to install a package with NPM or something).

> Asking for things you can look up how to do on the Internet just isn’t a good question

That is becoming less true by the day, as forums, blogs, etc., are filled with AI-generated pablum or with simply incorrect content. You still need an expert to tell you right from wrong, and the best option is to have a senior person in your team be that expert.

Either way, you need to bother to try to look up stuff for 5 minutes and figure it out yourself, and for technical content that isn't really the case much. Otherwise you make your mentor annoyed because you didn't even bother to put in the minimum effort and your essentially disrespecting them which creates emotional fallout. Even the bad content gives you some context and will make your question asking work better.

This is a great guide to give to everyone: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/

> That is becoming less true by the day, as forums, blogs, etc., are filled with AI-generated pablum or with simply incorrect content.

I’d contend if you can’t tell as a junior engineer that’s a problem.

Often the barrage of questions is a symptom of an inability to debug and investigate.

Sadly, it's common with folks who learned programming with rote (they expect every answer to be somewhere they can just memorize).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com