I agree with the underlying message of this article -- that there's tremendous value in being persistent when debugging issues you're having. However, trying to present it as some kind of mantra ("never ask for help") and using loaded terms like "rockstar" is misleading and foolish. When developers begin to think of themselves as "rockstars", or when they adopt mantras like "never ask for help", this only encourages them to develop an unhealthy attitude about themselves. As jquast touched on below, there's nothing that will undermine a team's collective productivity quicker than ego problems.
Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
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Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#42I think it's much better to say "Don't ask for solutions". There is enormous benefit in figuring out a solution, and flexing those mental muscles is really important, but I think that it's also very reasonable to talk with a mentor or co-worker about a problem and be given some tools (mental, software, or otherwise) to help work through a solution. I think that good mentors and senior developers default to this approach even when they are asked for solutions, at least those who are invested in growing the capabilities of their teams.
Looking at my personal experience, I'm one of the two senior developers on our 10-person team, and I'm typically the person that our junior and mid-level developers approach with any questions they might have. We have two developers on our team who started about a year apart, both of them have networking backgrounds and had no personal or professional development experience before joining our team. Our newest developer who is very motivated to grow and learn and wants to figure everything out for himself- give him a problem and he'll run off and you won't hear from him again until he has a solution and a war story about the three other approaches he tried before he arrived at this best of all solutions. The other developer did and still does ask for a lot of help, but the question is always "how do I learn about this".
The first developer is still awful. He constantly falls victim to the problem of unknown-unknowns, and while his solutions are frequently clever they often are completely obviated by a small bit of knowledge about computer science, or of a common tool, or of a common development practice. Eventually when you see what he's come up with you can point out how something that already exists could have solved the problem, and there's even a bit of benefit to his understanding why things may be done in a certain way, having run into some of the problems they solve himself during his implementation- but the overall rate of progress is incredibly slow and as often as not after investing so much effort into his solution he fails to see why another approach would be better. The second developer has grown into a very skilled developer remarkably quickly, and I think it's because while they both have the tendency to shave yaks and crawl down rabbit holes in search of knowledge, the second developer has been willing to ask what the most profitable yaks to shave would be, how to best crawl down the deepest rabbit holes, and where to find the obscure bits of knowledge that you might not run into without the arcane search phrase incantations that seem to only come about with a lot of experience and a bit of luck.
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#43It's also important to ask questions well: "here's what I did and what I expected, but this happened instead. Here's what else I've tried and researched before asking you, and these are the things I'm not sure about". Forming a good question often leads to the answer in of itself. By writing it down and emailing it instead, the person can answer it at their own leisure, and the response can be easily shared with the…
Interresting, how to you handle the time pressure that stopping and reading the whole documentation generates? (Pick Spring documentation for example)
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#44Ironically, at my yearly review at MS I've got negative response from my manager that I'm not asking for help. If I remember remember correctly he used the word "silo". Second negative response was that at meetings I give solution to the problems, instead of collaborating with team members and help them to come up to solution as well.
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#45I came across this a while back and is what I tell all the newer people that I mentor: https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/10/you-must-try-and-then-you-m... Some people tend to miss the "You MUST try" part. I am more than happy to take a million questions of the "I tried x, y, z and saw a, b, and c; what's up?" variety. Where it gets frustrating are questions like "I haven't really tried to hunt this down yet, but how do I…
Yeah, exactly. This seems to be what the criticism was, but seemingly the OP morphed that into "never ask for help". No, you should ask for help after you've spent a reasonable amount of time and effort going down the obvious solution paths first.
The power of the human species is that we're able to share knowledge. The undisputed best way to learn is through human collaboration. There's a reason why we've designed our education system with teachers/instructors etc. instead of locking students in an empty room with a text book.
The idea that you learn better if you bang your head against a wall for days is just flat out wrong. Perhaps if the person you're learning from is in competition with you, or is a terrible teacher, or doesn't like you, or is in a company culture that is against collaboration, but if you have a competent instructor, learning via collaboration is the undisputed best way to learn. That teacher can (and should) explain to you all the dead-end paths that you would have banged your head against yourself, in a matter of minutes, and you'll get all the same benefits out of it as if you had done it yourself.
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#46I believe the title is misleading. And contains the childish 'rockstar' moniker.
Other than that, it's actually pretty good. People underestimate the value of spinning your wheels at a problem. Usually, you end up figuring out a lot more than you initially though. Even if you do end up having to ask for help - at least you know what NOT to ask.
The thing about wheel spinning is that you'll eventually bury yourself if left unchecked.
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#47This essay follows the format of "Title Phrased in Absolutes", followed by an essay that tempers the absolutes greatly, advocating for a reasonable middle ground.
Please don't do this. A much better title for this essay would be "Good Developers Know When to Ask For Help".
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#48The mere act of asking for help can help you realize the answer. It's called rubber duck debugging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#49I distinctly remember the day at my first job out of college when my boss realized that I didn't know how to effectively use a debugger. He proceeded to sit down with me and demonstrate proper use of breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, etc. I didn't know how much I didn't know. There were many other interactions with coworkers along these lines. I was great at what I'd done, but had no idea how much existed outside my narrow range of experience.
For the next click-baity title, I suggest something along the lines of "Rockstar Developers Collaborate More Than They Question".
Re: Why Rockstar Developers Don't Ask for Help
#50I learned coding without books or the Internet and none to ask questions. I did have Internet at school though, where I printed tutorials and source code.
Not being able to find answers forced me to think by myself and do trial and error. I believe that made me a batter coder.
I actually feel a bit lazy now when I look up stuff on the Internet without even trying for myself first.