I agree with alexkearns. Having been in both positions I would have to say that you are going to build a better team by letting them communicate with each other

I agree with alexkearns. Having been in both positions I would have to say that you are going to build a better team by letting them communicate with each other. IM, IRC and email are excellent tools for this, allowing you to easily decide when to answer their questions. How is the new programmer supposed to integrate with the rest of the team if they don't ask questions? As well as the fact that Google generally sucks for programming questions these days. Your project will progress much more quickly if the newbie spends 5 minutes with a senior developer learning than 3 hours with Google sifting through answers they don't have the experience to analyze.