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If your team penalizes you for "asking questions and looking like an idiot" then the team culture is poor. Nobody knows everything. Everyone makes mistakes. Th

If your team penalizes you for "asking questions and looking like an idiot" then the team culture is poor. Nobody knows everything. Everyone makes mistakes. The team should help those people but they need to ask. Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a token value. Because we've worked hard making our team a safe place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable asking what I was missing. Heck it's give and take, I know way more DevOps and Linux-y stuff, the devs know more about their job. Because we try to think as a team, we do better and have less interpersonal clashes. I still complain about things each dev does, that's natural, but our team does pretty well together.

slily 3y ago
> Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a token value. Because we've worked hard making our team a safe place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable asking what I was missing. Heck it's give and take, I know way more DevOps and Linux-y stuff, the devs know more about their job. That's easier to do when you're more or less on "equal footing", but if you're a junior, it can take months to years to develop knowledge that seniors don't (depending on several factors). That's the problem, it takes much longer to reach a point where you have knowledge that is equivalent to that of seniors if the culture doesn't lend itself to frequent and high-quality communication and you have to learn about internal tools, processes, code bases and such largely solo. If you share a physical space with seniors you'll at least have some common downtime like a coffee or water break to "bother" them and it can save minutes to hours of tedium each time. So either you end up being "that guy always asking stupid questions in the chat and interrupting my work" or you spend a lot of time spinning your wheels pointlessly for months/years on end. The first approach leads to unhelpful and delayed responses and the latter makes you so inefficient that you favor lower quality work so that you can actually deliver something.
theideaofcoffee 3y ago
This is such an important point I don’t think it can be overstated. Psychological safety is one of the key things to have a well-functioning culture and it’s one of those cultural things that I’ve tried desperately change in past positions. It’s hard, and in one place, almost impossible save for eliminating a few key people who hold onto that mindset and clean house a little bit. There is no growth, no team cohesion in an environment where you’re berated for asking seemingly stupid or dumb questions. But I think people become numb and indoctrinated to it because “well, I had to endure this when I was learning” is such a demoralizing and abusive stance and nobody wants to change. Things work so much better when everyone has a chance to pitch in, even if some ideas are dumb, just having the option is miles ahead of whatever bullshit people can justify from the “old way”. Part of the process to change I’ve found is just leading by example. I’ll intentionally ask stupid questions that I know raise the ire of my similarly-leveled coworkers just to make the point to the more junior people that “hey, this staff-level guy is asking this, I might be able to too”. Junior people will gradually start to get the picture and ignore the rantings and ravings and toxicity of the debbie-downwers and the sticks-in-the-mud.

slily 3y ago

> Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a token value. Because we've worked hard making our team a safe place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable asking what I was missing. Heck it's give and take, I know way more DevOps and Linux-y stuff, the devs know more about their job. That's easier to do when you're more or less on "equal footing", but if you're a junior, it can take months to years to develop knowledge that seniors don't (depending on several factors). That's the problem, it takes much longer to reach a point where you have knowledge that is equivalent to that of seniors if the culture doesn't lend itself to frequent and high-quality communication and you have to learn about internal tools, processes, code bases and such largely solo. If you share a physical space with seniors you'll at least have some common downtime like a coffee or water break to "bother" them and it can save minutes to hours of tedium each time. So either you end up being "that guy always asking stupid questions in the chat and interrupting my work" or you spend a lot of time spinning your wheels pointlessly for months/years on end. The first approach leads to unhelpful and delayed responses and the latter makes you so inefficient that you favor lower quality work so that you can actually deliver something.

theideaofcoffee 3y ago

This is such an important point I don’t think it can be overstated. Psychological safety is one of the key things to have a well-functioning culture and it’s one of those cultural things that I’ve tried desperately change in past positions. It’s hard, and in one place, almost impossible save for eliminating a few key people who hold onto that mindset and clean house a little bit. There is no growth, no team cohesion in an environment where you’re berated for asking seemingly stupid or dumb questions. But I think people become numb and indoctrinated to it because “well, I had to endure this when I was learning” is such a demoralizing and abusive stance and nobody wants to change. Things work so much better when everyone has a chance to pitch in, even if some ideas are dumb, just having the option is miles ahead of whatever bullshit people can justify from the “old way”. Part of the process to change I’ve found is just leading by example. I’ll intentionally ask stupid questions that I know raise the ire of my similarly-leveled coworkers just to make the point to the more junior people that “hey, this staff-level guy is asking this, I might be able to too”. Junior people will gradually start to get the picture and ignore the rantings and ravings and toxicity of the debbie-downwers and the sticks-in-the-mud.