I have a good story about this: My first time really working with a great scientist, we were taking genetic papers and making them code for improving analysis. I spent two days writing a perl script before I finally got frustrated enough to ask for help.
The first question he asked was "Did you email the author(s)?" I said I hadn't and didn't want to bother this seemingly very important scientist. He told me nonsense, that most of them don't mind responding but he warned me to be terse and to the point. I emailed the gentleman and told him what I was doing and my issues, and asked him for some guidance. He sent me back a one line awk-script that did everything all that perl was failing to do!
Of course all that proves is I'm horrible at perl, but it was an important moment in my life that showed me that even very smart and important people are still just people, and that just asking is often a great way to learn new things yourself, and that sometimes you just need to step back and reconsider what tools you are using. I am forever grateful that an awesome geneticist who needed help bootstrapping tech infra took the time to teach me, a greybeard sysadmin type, practical, reproducible science, from paper to implimentation. I learned a lot but the biggest downside is, after being heavily surrounded by scientists in the workplace in most jobs since then, I find companies without that difficult to work for.