Neither extreme - asking for help with everything, nor asking for help with nothing - is good. You don't want to distract your coworkers to the point that they

Neither extreme - asking for help with everything, nor asking for help with nothing - is good. You don't want to distract your coworkers to the point that they can't be productive. But I've been in the situation where the right question can take 15 seconds of my time and save you days, judging by how long it took me to figure out when I ran into the same problem. All because of some arcane, poorly documented bit of domain specific trivia. And that's when I had the advantage of being the resident expert in the domain! Should it be documented? Maybe. It might be! But it's missing the keywords you'd look for, it's out of date because the domain is a moving target, and at the top it says "poke MaulingMonkey to see if these docs are up to date" - so you'll be checking with me anyways, right? The docs are there to save me the trouble of re-explaining everything from scratch - I'll update them (again) and let you work through them. For the simpler stuff, it may be easier to just explain. For bonus points, you can ask questions while minimizing disruption. Asking questions asynchronously (e.g. via irc/email) and letting them respond asynchronously (no 'did you get my email' 5 minutes later at their desk) is a great way to do this. I can respond when I'm compiling, when the 15 seconds to respond "the answer is 42" / "dunno, I can swing by in a bit if you need a second set of eyes" / "dunno, ask <relevant domain programmer>" isn't going to make me forget what I was working on.