Interesting. I think that the original phrase was only ever guidance suitable for: a) chastising employees with no initiative who enter a wait-state as soon as

Interesting. I think that the original phrase was only ever guidance suitable for: a) chastising employees with no initiative who enter a wait-state as soon as they hit the least obstacle. b) senior managers whose job is in fact to find solutions. In the first case, I have unfortunately worked with people who just stop at the first obstacle but this is very rare among tech people. Probably because part of any programmer's experience of learning to code is long periods of trying to get things to work, checking google for solutions etc. If anything coders often work on problems solo for too long rather than not long enough before escalating. Junior people especially will have had years of writing code solo in high school and college before they join a team so it's a habit to get out of. The second group of people it absolutely applies to. The important thing to get right is to bring the problem along with the appropriate context and solutions which have been tried and do not work rather than just the problem. It's just like writing a good bug report, actually. How much should be tried to get a solution depends on the seniority of the person doing it. If they're leading a team then I would expect a quick heads up early but no more, something like "we're having a performance issue in X, it might have the following effects on other parts of the project, we're trying a, b, and c. No action required on your part at this point". On the other hand if they're a junior member of a dev team on their second day, I would expect them to escalate an issue that they can't solve themselves in 10 minutes to whoever is doing their onboarding / immediate line manager.