Asking questions quickly is optimal for resolving the immediate problem, but not necessarily for understanding the components involved in the answer, or the tim

Asking questions quickly is optimal for resolving the immediate problem, but not necessarily for understanding the components involved in the answer, or the time of the person being asked. Even if you write off the latter as ~free, the former is a significant benefit to someone familiarizing themselves with a new environment, and even someone walking the junior person through the process of reasoning through how to get there probably won't cover the same benefits as they might have experienced doing it themselves because they likely don't think exactly the same way. Of course, it's an immediate versus long term tradeoff too, and a personal tradeoff for when to ask, and with how many people tend to just refuse to ask questions because they've been trained to think this makes them look bad, it probably makes sense to aggressively incentivize asking by default, but there are benefits to spending time on a problem yourself if you have enough tools to bootstrap your way into more understanding, and I have met enough people who never understood things more than just how to lookup the answer from someone knowledgable to think this isn't something to also be concerned about.