Before you grab your pitchfork — hear me out.
I'm not saying suffer in silence. I'm not saying Stack Overflow is cheating. I'm not some boomer gatekeeper who thinks struggle builds character.
I'm saying the WAY most juniors ask for help is actively making them worse at their job.
The pattern
Every team Slack has this message at least once a day:
"Hey, how do I do X?"
No context. No evidence of effort. Just a question lobbed into the void, waiting for someone to do the thinking for them.
And usually, someone does. Because seniors are nice. Because it's faster to answer than to teach. Because we've all been there.
But every time someone hands you the answer, you learn almost nothing. You get unstuck for 20 minutes. And then you're stuck again.
What's actually happening
When you ask "how do I do X?" you're outsourcing the hardest part of programming: the figuring out.
The debugging. The reading error messages. The narrowing down. The forming a hypothesis and testing it.
That's not the annoying part of the job that you want to skip. That IS the job.
Senior developers aren't senior because they know more things. They're senior because they're better at figuring out things they don't know. And they got that way by doing it over and over — painfully, slowly, often wrong at first.
When you skip that process, you're not saving time. You're borrowing it from your future self.
The magic question format
Here's the version that actually makes you better:
"I'm trying to do X. I tried A and got this error. Then I tried B because I thought the issue was Y. Here's what I'm seeing. Am I on the right track, or am I missing something?"
That's it. That's the whole trick.
Notice what's different:
- You show what you tried (proof of effort)
- You show your reasoning (I can correct your mental model, not just your code)
- You ask a specific question (I can give a useful answer in 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes)
Every senior developer I know loves answering questions formatted like this. It's not annoying — it's enjoyable. You're showing me how you think, and I get to be a coach instead of a search engine.
"But I don't even know where to start"
Fair. Sometimes you're so lost that you can't even form a useful question.
Here's your minimum viable effort before asking:
Read the error message. Actually read it. The whole thing. Most error messages tell you exactly what's wrong. I know they're scary. Read them anyway.
Google the exact error message. In quotes. Add the language or framework name. Spend 10 minutes, not 10 seconds.
Isolate the problem. Does it break with simple input? Does it break on a different machine? What's the smallest version of the code that still breaks?
If you did those three things and you're still stuck — now ask. And include what you found in steps 1-3. That question is gold.
The 15-minute rule
Some teams formalize this: you must spend at least 15 minutes trying to solve it yourself before asking. Not 15 minutes staring at the screen — 15 minutes of active investigation.
I think 15 is too short, honestly. Thirty minutes of real effort is where the learning happens.
But the exact number doesn't matter. What matters is that you build the habit of trying first.
Because here's the dirty secret: half the time, you'll solve it yourself during those 30 minutes. And that solution sticks in your brain forever. The one someone handed you? Gone by Friday.
This isn't about gatekeeping
I'm not trying to make your life harder. I'm trying to fast-track you to the point where you don't need me anymore.
The best juniors I've worked with all had the same trait: they were relentless about understanding things themselves before escalating. They'd show up to the conversation with three failed attempts and a specific question. And they leveled up faster than anyone.
The ones who asked "how do I do X?" every hour? Some of them are still asking the same kind of questions years later.
TL;DR
Don't stop asking for help. Stop asking lazy questions.
The question is the skill. Not the answer.
What's the best question a junior ever asked you? Or the worst? Both are equally educational.
Top comments (1)
Yes! This is important to any developer working in a team setting in general.
I am currently working on trying to figuring out first before I seek out help since it allows me to challenge myself instead of asking one question, then a followup question again and again. Otherwise, you are not really learning. You are relying on others in hope you are seeking the answers. Great post!