Joh Doe, the mechanic trainee, has the arduous task of changing a tire.
After looking at the car a lot (and the car looking at him back ), he realized that he had no idea how to do this task, so he asks himself:
Is it time to ask my superior a technical question or should I still try a little harder?
This is a very common question, especially when you're at the beginning of your career, whether in technology or any other area.
But isn't it good to be a little independent? Doing things yourself, trying 300x before asking...
No. Your focus, especially in technology teams, should be on delivery yours tasks and time optimization.
Undeniably: you have a task, and you need to complete it as quickly and well done as possible,
so your time can move in the direction to add value to the product and team. The focus should be on solving the problem. If you don't know how to do it, YES you should ask.
But here is the main point: don't limit yourself, asking isn't just stopping your superior's works to help you to solve your problems. You can ask and get information from several sources / ways:
Ask to Google:
Ask to GPT:
Asking is more than asking someone else, you should ask questions for yourself, ask questions for google, ask questions for chatgpt.
All this is ask, research is ✨ ask ✨
When should I approach my team and superior?
You ask someone else when neither you alone nor other automated searches have been successful.
This shows 3 possible points: 1. you don't know what to ask, 2. you don't know how to search or 3. this knowledge is not publicly available.
So ask someone who has this knowledge privately, if you don't even know what to ask, it means you're pretty lost, so use a person or chatgpt to help you arrive at the right question. Search by "5 whys".
Prompt engineer is nothing more than knowing how to ask good questions.
HOW should I approach my team/superior?
There are different ways to ask:
❌ In the Direct:
Hello bro, how do you do X?
✅ On a public channel where everyone in engineering can see:
I'm working on this feature [ link to the context ] where the expected behavior is Y, I tried these approaches [ link to the approaches ], but still not successful.
Given the importance of this task, how can I solve it?
And already arriving with these basic questions and surveys answered in hand will make your team want to help you, because if not, you usually already know what you will get in return for a question from a technology company:
did you read the doc? did you search in the codebase? searched on google? Do you have an open issue? gpt chat ?
In John, our the mechanic trainee, context the boss would ask:
did you read the car manual? did you google it? did you see the step-by-step that Julius wrote about it 10 years ago?
Final issues
This article was inspired by a discussion on the discord/seraphini server community
Thanks to José Thomaz, Danilo Assis, Sibelius Seraphini, Akinn and Julio Merisio.
Hope this post can be helpful!
For some feedback or more content, follow me on twitter or github
Top comments (1)
Thanks Daniel, I think I needed this lol sometimes I forget that the answer I'm looking for might literally be a Google search away. You made me think of this tool adadot.com/ which is helping me a bit to figure out when reaching out to others is helping or disrupting precious time. Maybe you'll like it, too