[IanCal]

An employee spinning their wheels getting nowhere for a month because they didn't ask a question that someone more experienced could answer in 5 minutes is not a good tradeoff.

Unless you work for free, you are taking.

It's important to explain this kind of thing though, and guide people to when it is and isn't appropriate to ask for help.

[Clubber]

>An employee spinning their wheels getting nowhere for a month

I get aggravated when juniors ask me questions right off the bat without researching. It's because they are lazy and want a quick answer and of course submitting to this just leads to more questions more often, which leads to me getting less work done.

This is also bad for them because they don't learn how to figure it out for themselves through google / code research / debugging / etc. Learning how to learn is the essence of growing in the field. I've been dumped into codebases I didn't know before with little to no help, and it sucks; but you certainly learn how to learn.

I think spinning your wheels for a month is the opposite of that. If it takes someone a month to not figure something out, that would be a red flag for me.

[ryanlpeterman]

Agreed there is a balance. I wrote a little about when and how to ask questions as a junior engineer - https://twitter.com/ryanlpeterman/status/1628803643171557376