The tradeoff here being how much of your time are you willing to dedicate towards helping others, and for what level of task. As a general rule of thumb, I try

The tradeoff here being how much of your time are you willing to dedicate towards helping others, and for what level of task. As a general rule of thumb, I try to ask "Have you X, Y, or Z'd?" as a quick filter for if the person has engaged with the problem at all. A common example being "Do you know why I'm getting error message X?" "Have you checked the Y logs?" Ideally, people do some amount of leg work first and proactively state what they've done. Sometimes people will do the leg work, but need to be asked to share the context they've gathered. Sometimes people ask immediately, without any investigation of their own, because you might know and be able to save them time. Of course, having the full blown belligerent attitude of "I wont make any effort to help you" isn't very welcome, but "You should take a few hours to dive in, if you're still stuck, I'll set aside some time to take a look with you" is pretty reasonable.