When you have a question, ask it somewhere other people can see it.
The instinct runs the other way, and the instinct is polite. You do not want to bother a whole channel with something small. You do not want to look like you could not find it yourself. So you pick the one person who definitely knows, send them a direct message, get your answer, and everything seems fine.
A few things just happened that you did not see.
That person is now the only route to that piece of knowledge, and they are getting the same message from four other people this month. You have become a small part of a bottleneck that will eventually be described as that person never being available.
The answer landed in a private thread where nobody can find it. In six weeks somebody asks the same question, in another private thread, and the same person types the same paragraph again.
And nobody else got to learn anything, including the three quiet people who also did not know and were relieved somebody finally asked.
So ask in the channel. Say what you already tried, so it does not read as outsourcing your thinking. Trying to get the staging deploy to pick up the new config, I have checked this and this, is there a step I am missing.
You will get answers from people you would never have thought to ask. That is the part that surprises everyone the first time.
Two caveats worth keeping. Some things genuinely belong in private: anything about a person, anything about money, anything you would not want screenshotted. Use judgement.
And when someone does answer you privately, put the answer back in the public thread yourself. One line is enough. For anyone else hitting this, it was the region setting. You have just done the archiving nobody else was going to do.
The cost of asking in public is a few seconds of feeling exposed. The return is a searchable answer, a less overloaded colleague, and three people who learned something without having to admit they needed to.
Take the few seconds. Ask where it can be seen.
– Asael Shinder
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