## Notes [[Asking for help]] ## Highlights I ask people kind of dumb questions all the time, questions that I could have answered with Google or by searching our codebase. I mostly try not to, but sometimes I do it anyway and I don’t think it’s the end of the world. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqhw1mabg0am61kgp0dyr9)) Our goal is going to be to ask questions about technical concepts that are **easy to answer**. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqkktaajcxg8zzymkxs309)) State what you know This is one of my favorite question-asking techniques! This kind of question basically takes the form 1. State what you understand about the subject so far 2. Ask “is that right?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqkzh1kr3f0fhe7ee7mchf)) Ask questions where the answer is a fact A lot of the questions I have start out kind of vague, like “How do SQL joins work?”. That question isn’t awesome, because there are a lot of different parts of how joins work! ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqns1b7z56pc7zvk77a8jn)) When I ask super specific questions like this, the person I’m asking doesn’t always know the answer (which is fine!!) but at least they understand the _kind_ of question I’m interested in ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqpc0nmm31veha2ggax8bx)) Be willing to say what you don’t understand ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqpfn4mp63df63p4yyn4tx)) Being able to stop someone and say “hey, what does that mean?” is a super important skill. I think of it as being one of the properties of a confident engineer and an awesome thing to grow into. I see a lot of senior engineers who frequently ask for clarifications – I think when you’re more confident in your skills, this gets easier. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqr8axxp89jfdbv4jxk0w7)) creates space for the question _answerer_ to admit when they’ve reached the end of their knowledge! ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqrxkj8d85k0r3f7c74zpk)) Do some research ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqsv1p948am7k07r426srh)) then wrote down some more specific questions I had. Googling a little first helped me write slightly better questions! ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqt6qbp8r8fvnbt6r31xy1)) Some calculations I try to make when asking my coworkers questions are: - **is this a good time** for this person? (if they’re in the middle of a stressful thing, probably not) - will asking them this question save me as much time as it takes them? (if I can ask a question that takes them 5 minutes to answer, and will save me 2 hours, that’s excellent :D) - **How much time will it take them** to answer my questions? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwqvr2z9q0xjk4mxyapvjre)) Ask questions to show what’s not obvious A more advanced form of question asking is asking questions to reveal hidden assumptions or knowledge. This kind of question actually has two purposes – first, to get the answers (there is probably information one person has that other people don’t!) but also to point out that there _is_ some hidden information, and that sharing it is useful. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwr1b26ens1bheyq2xb5jk1)) What things do you look for when you suspect this type of failure happened?” “How did you judge that this situation was ‘normal?” How did you know that the database was down? How did you know that was the team you needed to page? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwr25v1z2aancqhf51h13km)) A lot of people really like answering questions! I think it’s important to think of good questions as an awesome thing that you can do to add to the conversation, not just “ask good questions so that people are only a little annoyed instead of VERY annoyed” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hkwre2kh16a9d5140zg0d382))