6 ms·

Anecdotally, when I started at my current job, it was made clear to me that I should ask questions and not think twice about it. They said to ask in our public

by jjice 4y ago

Anecdotally, when I started at my current job, it was made clear to me that I should ask questions and not think twice about it. They said to ask in our public engineering slack channel (remote work) so everyone could see and have more eyes on it for answers plus future searching. It was such a great experience, and I put a lot of that on the culture of questions my boss put into place. When we had more and more engineers join, including interns, I made sure they heard the same thing I did and felt comfortable asking any questions. I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). I will repeat it to the point where it's likely annoying during mentoring and onboarding meetings, but people will be very open with their questions, which I'm very happy with. It takes a bit of extra time out of everyone's day to respond to questions, but you're unblocking someone in 2 chunks of 10 minutes (mentor and mentee) which saves the mentee upwards of hours, and this can compound with future situations if they don't have a complete understanding of the situation. I really appreciate a question friendly culture and I would never want to work at a place that isn't like that again.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I was always partial to the aphorism "The only stupid question is the one we don't ask." I used to participate in StackOverflow, quite a bit (not so much, these days). They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site. Just look at the question counts of the high-numbered folks. It's usually a single-digit number, with that digit frequently being "0." It's fairly obvious that people that actually ask questions are treated badly.
- leetrout 4y ago
  Lots of questions get deleted too. I asked this question on the math site https://mathoverflow.net/questions/373993/is-the-haversine-function-a-norm https://mathoverflow.net/questions/373993/is-the-haversine-f... I am not a "math person" and was struggling to understand how these various functions fit into "norms" or not. I think by-and-large none of these communities are helpful or welcoming to most people. And that is a shame.
  - henrydark 4y ago
    To be fair, mathoverflow.net has always been for professional mathematics, mostly for professional mathematicians. Though these days even professional questions are sometimes treated poorly.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I remember asking a question[0] on Webmasters Stack Exchange. They nuked it, and told me to ask it on regular StackOverflow. Apparently, you are not supposed to ask non-SEO questions on Webmasters SE. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52060900/strange-behavior-of-chrome-print-css-fix https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52060900/strange-behavio...
- adamc 4y ago
  StackOverflow is kind of horrible. I keep waiting for someone to disrupt that market with a less awful product.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    Yeah, I would love for there to be a new StackOverflow where newbies could ask questions ad nauseum without being blocked for not having answered enough questions or received upvotes from others. It has turned into a walled garden where the people who got in early have the credentials to participate and get help while also risking losing the clout that got them there and everyone else has little opportunity to get help overcoming their personal hurdles in becoming competent programmers.
    - Attrecomet 4y ago
      If you ever find out how to make that product but not be flooded with newbie questions when you search professionally useful answers you could turn that into a lot of money.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      I wonder if it's viable to have a site where you pay for asking questions (there are thematic sites like this, we call them "support forums", but AFAIK, no generic one). Volunteer based answering will always lead to some kind of reputation economy, and those seem to attract assholes.
      - BizarroLand 4y ago
        Would people pay though? Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to pick the person who answered them best, and failing that, upvotes would decide whom the spoils go to. It would be easy to game such a system. Ask your question, get the answer, have a sock puppet account also post that answer, pick your sock puppet as the winner, only pay $0.25 for your question to be answered and stiff the person who actually put the work in to solve your problem. If it were upvote based, people would have multiple sock puppet accounts to upvote their sock puppet answer. Adding money into the mix makes it more difficult by a massive order of magnitude. Stack Overflow could open a paid noob question area and profit immensely from it, but a newcomer would first have to build the audience, get participation, and then introduce the payment system while working constantly to guard against sock puppets ruining the system.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  early unix culture was overtly hostile about beginner'ish questions and other fumbling. The advanced practitioner was marked with extra awd sed chops while those questioning poor man pages were essentially spanked publicly. This happened repeatedly in different contexts that I saw.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    awd = awk?
- coryfklein 4y ago
  > They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site. I totally disagree! I have 50k rep on StackOverflow, and roughly a quarter of that comes from the questions I've asked (I have 213 questions, 166 answers). In fact, that is my favorite way to interact with the site; I personally get excited when I find a question of mine that isn't answered on StackOverflow. That said, writing a good question is an art. The impression that SO has a culture of not asking questions I think is at least partly impacted by the aspects of the culture that came into existence to deal with the huge deluge of really bad questions that it gets literally every second of every day. Then, even if you put in the time and effort to actually write a well researched and thought out question, it's not uncommon to get close votes and downvotes. This is unfortunate, but it also usually comes from a small fraction of users who see your question within its first 5 minutes of posting. Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    > Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream. Only if your question is common, and possibly common enough to already have an answer. That's rarely the case for me, and this issue is why I've stopped using SO beyond just reading.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    > I totally disagree! Well, I guess we'll just have to "agree to disagree," then... I have "only" about a 4.5K rep, but almost twice as many questions as answers. Most of my rep comes from questions. My SO tagline is "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers." I have become quite good at writing really good, well-researched questions, which usually get ignored. I generally end up answering them, myself. Instead, simple ones get answered; often with a somewhat passive-aggressive "slap." I've learned to ignore the insult, and still be nice and thankful for the answer. It's been a valuable resource for me, but is now a lot less valuable.
    - 4y ago
peteradio 4y ago
This probably works well in already competent organizations, where followup questions are not met with "because we say so". I've worked at orgs where a simple question like "why are we reinventing caching at every new instance?" is met with pretty subpar answers that amount to more of a digging in than an actual enlightening reasoning. Note that many of the customer reported bugs boiled down to caching.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  I think the healthiest way to react to that sort of bluntness is to respond in kind. "I understand this isn't my decision to make. I just want to be abundantly clear that I think it's the wrong judgment call, and here's why. I think it would be valuable, not only to solve the problem itself, but also to improve our working relationship if you show more value in my perspective in the future. I'm not interested in winning or losing. I am here to work with you." At the end of the day, one of you is wrong. If that can't be communicated well, then you deserve a better workplace.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Or, don't ask the question and do the right thing so you don't go against orders you never received. That is kind of what I'm suggesting works if you are stuck in an environment with crappy responses.
    - thomastjeffery 4y ago
      Only if it's worth it to you to stay. Most people I've known in that situation were miserable. It's usually not worth it.
boris 4y ago
What do you do when some of these mentees (as you put it) get so used to having every question promptly answered that they stop reading the documentation or putting even a modest amount of effort into figuring out why things don't work as expected? To be clear, I am not being facetious/sarcastic; I have this exact problem at the moment (in an open source project) and could use some tips. Surely you (or others) must have run into this. My best idea so far is to throttle my replies proportional to the offences.
- zach_garwood 4y ago
  I think a simple "I need you to figure this one out on your own today" or "you and Employee 421 should discuss this, they had a similar problem last week" is probably better than just refusing to reply. Ghosting someone isn't a winning strategy.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Keep answering the questions, but include a reference to the docs in your answer. Your goal is to introduce them to the usefulness of the tool that is documentation, not to simply unburden yourself of trivial questions. If your documentation is good enough to answer their questions, then sooner or later they will start to use it first, because that's easier than asking a question. The next thing you can do is ask them if they think the documentation can be improved, so that the answer to their question is easier for the next person to find. Usually, it's not the substance of the answer that they were struggling to find, but the context that would have lead them there in the first place. When that happens, it feels like your answer is trivial, but that's because the real value of the interaction was encapsulated into the very act of you answering, not the answer itself. Documentation can be a great way of referencing nouns and verbs. Good documentation will probably answer "what?" and "how?". Great documentation will answer "where?". The trickiest questions end up being "when?" and "why?".
  - hinkley 4y ago
    You can get people to self serve by putting stuff in the wiki. It’s a good way to make sure things get into the wiki in the first place. Tired of answering the same question? Did you write the answer somewhere? Can people find it? No? Then you’re part of this equation, buster.
flappyeagle 4y ago
On my teams, we facilitate this by creating a slack channel called [new hire]_ASKS with a small team of dedicated watchers that set alerts to “all messages” The new hire knows that there are a group of people whose assignment is to answer their questions.
efsavage 4y ago
> I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). It's also important to see established/senior/experienced people doing it before less-experienced people will be comfortable doing it. I'm the most experienced person on my team and I'm pretty sure I ask more questions and say "I don't know" more than anyone else.
- jjice 4y ago
  That's a good point. We all ask our questions in some open Slack channels so that might have a lot do it with it actually.
mattarm 4y ago
Yes, question friendliness is beneficial! Somewhere along the line in school I realized that whenever I had a question most often many other people did too. I lost my fear of asking questions after a lot of feedback from others: "I'm so glad you asked that question, I was completely lost!" In my career I realized that nothing had changed, and that asking for more clarity is almost always a good thing.
kashyapc 4y ago
As you might already know, this philosophy of openly asking questions in a public channel is one of the important aspects of open source development model. FWIW, many moons ago I wrote an etiquette doc[1] on being a decent community citizen when asking questions on upstream IRC channels (yes, they're still a thing :P) and what to avoid, etc. Many of these guidelines apply in an internal setting too. [1] https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/ https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/
diob 4y ago
Yes! You hit the nail on the head. It's also a lead by example thing, where I love seeing more experienced folk asking questions. Where do you work if you don't mind the question?
JALTU 4y ago
A friendly culture open to question asking in public is fine if everyone is kind about it. Having worked someplace where that wasn't the case, and where one might be told, "wow, you really should read the policy about x" in public on Slack (despite the fact one had read it and didn't feel pushing back in public was appropriate), one learns to stop asking questions in public because a) management does nothing after the fact, b) doesn't seem to know or care better, c) is the offending party, or d) all of the above. Just sayin' - it happens, but if you have a healthy culture, that surely can be awesome.

by jjice 4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I was always partial to the aphorism "The only stupid question is the one we don't ask." I used to participate in StackOverflow, quite a bit (not so much, these days). They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site. Just look at the question counts of the high-numbered folks. It's usually a single-digit number, with that digit frequently being "0." It's fairly obvious that people that actually ask questions are treated badly.

leetrout 4y ago
Lots of questions get deleted too. I asked this question on the math site https://mathoverflow.net/questions/373993/is-the-haversine-function-a-norm https://mathoverflow.net/questions/373993/is-the-haversine-f... I am not a "math person" and was struggling to understand how these various functions fit into "norms" or not. I think by-and-large none of these communities are helpful or welcoming to most people. And that is a shame.
- henrydark 4y ago
  To be fair, mathoverflow.net has always been for professional mathematics, mostly for professional mathematicians. Though these days even professional questions are sometimes treated poorly.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I remember asking a question[0] on Webmasters Stack Exchange. They nuked it, and told me to ask it on regular StackOverflow. Apparently, you are not supposed to ask non-SEO questions on Webmasters SE. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52060900/strange-behavior-of-chrome-print-css-fix https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52060900/strange-behavio...
adamc 4y ago
StackOverflow is kind of horrible. I keep waiting for someone to disrupt that market with a less awful product.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  Yeah, I would love for there to be a new StackOverflow where newbies could ask questions ad nauseum without being blocked for not having answered enough questions or received upvotes from others. It has turned into a walled garden where the people who got in early have the credentials to participate and get help while also risking losing the clout that got them there and everyone else has little opportunity to get help overcoming their personal hurdles in becoming competent programmers.
  - Attrecomet 4y ago
    If you ever find out how to make that product but not be flooded with newbie questions when you search professionally useful answers you could turn that into a lot of money.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    I wonder if it's viable to have a site where you pay for asking questions (there are thematic sites like this, we call them "support forums", but AFAIK, no generic one). Volunteer based answering will always lead to some kind of reputation economy, and those seem to attract assholes.
    - BizarroLand 4y ago
      Would people pay though? Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to pick the person who answered them best, and failing that, upvotes would decide whom the spoils go to. It would be easy to game such a system. Ask your question, get the answer, have a sock puppet account also post that answer, pick your sock puppet as the winner, only pay $0.25 for your question to be answered and stiff the person who actually put the work in to solve your problem. If it were upvote based, people would have multiple sock puppet accounts to upvote their sock puppet answer. Adding money into the mix makes it more difficult by a massive order of magnitude. Stack Overflow could open a paid noob question area and profit immensely from it, but a newcomer would first have to build the audience, get participation, and then introduce the payment system while working constantly to guard against sock puppets ruining the system.
mistrial9 4y ago
early unix culture was overtly hostile about beginner'ish questions and other fumbling. The advanced practitioner was marked with extra awd sed chops while those questioning poor man pages were essentially spanked publicly. This happened repeatedly in different contexts that I saw.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  awd = awk?
coryfklein 4y ago
> They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site. I totally disagree! I have 50k rep on StackOverflow, and roughly a quarter of that comes from the questions I've asked (I have 213 questions, 166 answers). In fact, that is my favorite way to interact with the site; I personally get excited when I find a question of mine that isn't answered on StackOverflow. That said, writing a good question is an art. The impression that SO has a culture of not asking questions I think is at least partly impacted by the aspects of the culture that came into existence to deal with the huge deluge of really bad questions that it gets literally every second of every day. Then, even if you put in the time and effort to actually write a well researched and thought out question, it's not uncommon to get close votes and downvotes. This is unfortunate, but it also usually comes from a small fraction of users who see your question within its first 5 minutes of posting. Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  > Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream. Only if your question is common, and possibly common enough to already have an answer. That's rarely the case for me, and this issue is why I've stopped using SO beyond just reading.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > I totally disagree! Well, I guess we'll just have to "agree to disagree," then... I have "only" about a 4.5K rep, but almost twice as many questions as answers. Most of my rep comes from questions. My SO tagline is "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers." I have become quite good at writing really good, well-researched questions, which usually get ignored. I generally end up answering them, myself. Instead, simple ones get answered; often with a somewhat passive-aggressive "slap." I've learned to ignore the insult, and still be nice and thankful for the answer. It's been a valuable resource for me, but is now a lot less valuable.
  - 4y ago

peteradio 4y ago

This probably works well in already competent organizations, where followup questions are not met with "because we say so". I've worked at orgs where a simple question like "why are we reinventing caching at every new instance?" is met with pretty subpar answers that amount to more of a digging in than an actual enlightening reasoning. Note that many of the customer reported bugs boiled down to caching.

thomastjeffery 4y ago
I think the healthiest way to react to that sort of bluntness is to respond in kind. "I understand this isn't my decision to make. I just want to be abundantly clear that I think it's the wrong judgment call, and here's why. I think it would be valuable, not only to solve the problem itself, but also to improve our working relationship if you show more value in my perspective in the future. I'm not interested in winning or losing. I am here to work with you." At the end of the day, one of you is wrong. If that can't be communicated well, then you deserve a better workplace.
- peteradio 4y ago
  Or, don't ask the question and do the right thing so you don't go against orders you never received. That is kind of what I'm suggesting works if you are stuck in an environment with crappy responses.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Only if it's worth it to you to stay. Most people I've known in that situation were miserable. It's usually not worth it.

boris 4y ago

What do you do when some of these mentees (as you put it) get so used to having every question promptly answered that they stop reading the documentation or putting even a modest amount of effort into figuring out why things don't work as expected? To be clear, I am not being facetious/sarcastic; I have this exact problem at the moment (in an open source project) and could use some tips. Surely you (or others) must have run into this. My best idea so far is to throttle my replies proportional to the offences.

zach_garwood 4y ago
I think a simple "I need you to figure this one out on your own today" or "you and Employee 421 should discuss this, they had a similar problem last week" is probably better than just refusing to reply. Ghosting someone isn't a winning strategy.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
Keep answering the questions, but include a reference to the docs in your answer. Your goal is to introduce them to the usefulness of the tool that is documentation, not to simply unburden yourself of trivial questions. If your documentation is good enough to answer their questions, then sooner or later they will start to use it first, because that's easier than asking a question. The next thing you can do is ask them if they think the documentation can be improved, so that the answer to their question is easier for the next person to find. Usually, it's not the substance of the answer that they were struggling to find, but the context that would have lead them there in the first place. When that happens, it feels like your answer is trivial, but that's because the real value of the interaction was encapsulated into the very act of you answering, not the answer itself. Documentation can be a great way of referencing nouns and verbs. Good documentation will probably answer "what?" and "how?". Great documentation will answer "where?". The trickiest questions end up being "when?" and "why?".
- hinkley 4y ago
  You can get people to self serve by putting stuff in the wiki. It’s a good way to make sure things get into the wiki in the first place. Tired of answering the same question? Did you write the answer somewhere? Can people find it? No? Then you’re part of this equation, buster.

flappyeagle 4y ago

On my teams, we facilitate this by creating a slack channel called [new hire]_ASKS with a small team of dedicated watchers that set alerts to “all messages” The new hire knows that there are a group of people whose assignment is to answer their questions.

efsavage 4y ago

> I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). It's also important to see established/senior/experienced people doing it before less-experienced people will be comfortable doing it. I'm the most experienced person on my team and I'm pretty sure I ask more questions and say "I don't know" more than anyone else.

jjice 4y ago
That's a good point. We all ask our questions in some open Slack channels so that might have a lot do it with it actually.

mattarm 4y ago

Yes, question friendliness is beneficial! Somewhere along the line in school I realized that whenever I had a question most often many other people did too. I lost my fear of asking questions after a lot of feedback from others: "I'm so glad you asked that question, I was completely lost!" In my career I realized that nothing had changed, and that asking for more clarity is almost always a good thing.

kashyapc 4y ago

As you might already know, this philosophy of openly asking questions in a public channel is one of the important aspects of open source development model. FWIW, many moons ago I wrote an etiquette doc[1] on being a decent community citizen when asking questions on upstream IRC channels (yes, they're still a thing :P) and what to avoid, etc. Many of these guidelines apply in an internal setting too. [1] https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/ https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/

diob 4y ago

Yes! You hit the nail on the head. It's also a lead by example thing, where I love seeing more experienced folk asking questions. Where do you work if you don't mind the question?

JALTU 4y ago

A friendly culture open to question asking in public is fine if everyone is kind about it. Having worked someplace where that wasn't the case, and where one might be told, "wow, you really should read the policy about x" in public on Slack (despite the fact one had read it and didn't feel pushing back in public was appropriate), one learns to stop asking questions in public because a) management does nothing after the fact, b) doesn't seem to know or care better, c) is the offending party, or d) all of the above. Just sayin' - it happens, but if you have a healthy culture, that surely can be awesome.