
Self-Managing People Are Smart about Asking for Help - gvb
https://spin.atomicobject.com/2017/07/05/asking-for-help/
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FLUX-YOU
You should think about the cost of asking for help before you actually do it.
Or ask it in a medium that allows for an async conversation. Take a measure of
how others ask questions or ask where most of the discussions take place (I
have only been in face-to-face driven places but it's not hard to imagine
Slack-driven places).

On most days, this will be fine, but getting tunnel vision and not being aware
of what's happening and asking silly javascript questions during important
deployments or production work will rub people the wrong way.

Your colleagues are not there to simply serve the "smartest and most talented
people that just know how to ask questions".

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rb808
"Every Olympian has a coach"

I like to do things by myself, but the quote above I heard a few years ago and
really changed the way I think about asking for help.

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johncole
I could have used this advice 10 years ago. This is a great article to pass on
to folks new to the working world. I don't know what other working
environments are like, but I appreciate people that keep the venting to a
minimum. You can easily frame yourself as the complainer, deserved or not, if
you use this one too much.

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city41
Venting to your manager seems mostly counterproductive to me. I'd argue rather
than vent you should at the very least identify the problem and potential
solutions.

Even in scrum, when doing a retro, they don't call them "negatives" but
"deltas", implying don't just complain, look for a solution.

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arti-fact
Exactly. If venting can be converted into identifying a problem and looking
for a solution, then it can a good thing. Venting often? There may be a larger
issue to tackle here.

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mixmastamyk
Definitely need to remind myself to ask more questions, but not lazy ones,
thanks.

But "ask" is a verb, not a noun, sheesh.

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burkaman
It's also a noun, both in common usage and in dictionaries.

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mixmastamyk
I see it's a British commonwealth thing:
[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ask](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ask)

Still it sounds like business executive jargon such "spend," also a turnoff.

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haburka
This is great advice for both managers and employees alike! I was told this a
long time ago, "good employees come to managers with solutions, not problems."
It has propelled me to be a self-managed person and it really puts me in a
place of making quality contributions to the good of the company. I think this
is especially important in development because if you ask for help whenever
you get blocked, your coworkers have to solve all of your hard problems! This
means that you don't relieve any pain from your team. However, if you instead
say, "I have 3 possible solutions, what do you think about them?" , or "can
you tell me the way you'd do this?" , then you can deal with the hard problems
without taking up too much of your coworkers time.

