Discussion
RE: https://mastodon.social/@3psboyd/117157180084565205
I would view this as a complete failure if anyone on my team felt this way. Nobody should ever be made to feel embarrassed for asking questions. We’re doing challenging and oftentimes confusing work. Good engineers ask questions!
@danirabbit absolutely this. I ask all the stupid questions all the time.
Occasionally the response is "oh my god we didn't think of that" 🤣
It's important to have a culture where that'd possible.
@danirabbit it's so sad, because before google and the algorithm cult destroyed search engines, forums all over the place were full of people freely answering obscure technical questions just because they had that that problem once too and wanted to help
My family thought I was "good with computers" but I didn't hide that half of it was just searching for error codes and so on (the other half being mostly the curiosity + willingness to poke at stuff and see what it does. And having a strong motivation like getting an ancient game working).
Sure, you got condescending or judgemental people too, but the open help was there. One of the few good things nerds were doing in the dark ages of the 2000s
@danirabbit Yeah, it's really important for people to feel comfortable with asking their co-workers questions. How does any workplace get things done without questions? It boggles my mind. No one knows everything.
@danirabbit Fondly remember the day I identified the cause of a bug to be a call-by-value. Whole project was Java.
@L29Ah I would highly encourage you not to use LLMs here. They are often very wrong and it wastes a lot more time to try to catch their mistakes than it would take to provide good mentorship. I want the people on my team to learn best practices and become better engineers. I learn things all the time from other people! If we cut out human mentorship we can only repeat mistakes
@danirabbit This is very much the culture, you’re thoroughly judged by the questions you ask. It’s almost like hazing as once junior engineers turn senior they put newcomers through the same gauntlet they went through.
@danirabbit
I likewise consider there to be a similar failure in the Linux community concerning asking questions, when ideally a subculture that revolves around the idea that people should understand their computers *should HELP people understand their computers*.
@danirabbit@mastodon.online i have the brain worms that make me scared to ask questions sometimes.
sometimes its not really anything a team or team leader has done, my brain is just really scared of the possibility that it will happen.
i don't really know what my point was going to be here
@miawgogo I think it’s our responsibility in leadership to take an active role here in encouraging folks to ask questions and to be seen asking questions! We can’t stop at saying “we haven’t done anything to make folks uncomfortable” but ask what we can do to make folks more comfortable 😊
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