[NiceOneBrah]

Depending on the work environment this might be good advice. On the flip side, however, I think many people have or remember having coworkers who ask questions any time they get stuck without hardly trying to solve the problem for themselves.

Spinning your wheels for too long doesn't help anyone, but a lot can be said for people who are independent and don't needlessly distract those around them.

[prodigal_erik]

This is an argument Spolsky once made in favor of offices I've always liked, from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html.

"Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

"Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff."

Granted, interrupting a peer makes more sense if you actually can't make progress without another opinion on design, rather than just being lazy and using them as a living reference work.

[tomjen3]

Also if your problem is that you don't understand some of the custom code, you often have no choice but to ask Jeff.