DEV Community

Discussion on: Fear of asking questions? What mindset should you have?

Collapse
 
practicingdev profile image
Practicing Developer

Hi Ken,

First of all, supportive environments for beginners not only expect you to ask plenty of questions, but they expect that there will be a learning curve in your process of discovering how to ask good questions, and so there enough is goodwill and patience to enable learning as you go.

Of course, many decent work environments still don't quite fit that ideal, and a fair share fall quite short of it.

What I would recommend is simply to try to be organized about how you ask questions. Take good notes as you work, and then review them before reaching out to others with your questions. Provide some background on the "What and Why" behind your questions, and try to make it as easy to reply as possible.

(I.e. if there's code someone needs to look at, reference exact relevant sections. If there's something that would benefit from a screenshot or diagram, or a quick demo, go for it. Anything to build context!)

Discuss openly with your collaborators how they would prefer to handle responding to questions. Some may like to do that in real time, some may like to respond asynchronously when they find time. Some may be comfortable with giving feedback and replying to whatever questions you have whenever things happen to come up, others may prefer to set dedicate time for office hours or reviews. Every situation is different, and learning how to adapt to what works for others is worthwhile.

Finally, do you just feel like your questions might have been seen as a disturbance, or did others say or do specific things that made you worry about that? If you share a little more about that I may be able to offer some additional suggestions.

One thing is for sure though, it would be better for you to "Fail by asking too much, even in the wrong way" than to "Fail by not getting the support you need" so... keep at it even if it's scary/uncomfortable at first. It gets better in time!