[jrandm]

My favorite working situations are when asking "stupid" questions and/or burning 6-12 hours on a subject is normalized and endorsed. I don't expect to live long enough to transcend anecdote, but both are necessary to learn and that's almost always important. I certainly had this in academic environments but they were somewhat cloistered or the educators expected them to be. In jobs like sysadmin/programming 6-12 hours on a thing could be 1 day or 15.

The 30-90 minute rule is to force people to search for answers themselves. If you don't know why that's necessary, I encourage you to spend several hours answering questions on sites you browse for answers (SO, HN, reddit, IRC, twitter, discord, slack, zoom, signal, mailing lists, GH issues, bugzilla, phpbb, anything) -- it'll take less than a week. People exist that don't do basic reading or research and will expect you to do everything for them. You'll get jaded.

The downside to this environment is a sort of pathological self-reliance. That's when these rules become upper limits: to keep someone from chasing waterfalls ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoKufWbP_L4 ). Collaboration always helps, some personal research is always needed... when to mix them varies.