[tresil]

This is interesting. We’ve arrived at a very similar set of guidelines on our team. One slight difference is that sometimes people want to reach out to a senior person not so much because they’re “stuck” in the middle of something, but before they even start on some new feature or development story. They want help with design or help with even determining what approach to take. Similar to the author’s suggestion to ask them what they’ve already tried, we ask for them to do their best to propose a solution, and then we go from there. That way they’re still in the drivers seat, and we evaluate the pros and cons of their approach so they get meaningful feedback for improvement.