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Comment by scubbo | Hacker News Reader

> - 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.

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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.

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.

Financial services?

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