How to Ask Questions as a New Engineer

As a developer, when you start off in an industry you might have a lot of question. A lot of them will not be technical, most of them will be management question. These are very common questions, but as a developer, you will have even more technical questions. For those technical questions, there needs to be processed to ask questions to your colleagues. There are THREE steps to asking a technical question.

Step 1:

GOOGLE IT. Too much of a surprise people with technical questions don’t consult the one thing that has almost all the answers. Researching a question should be your first reaction before asking a developer. Unless your question is to very specific architecture design for your team, one should google it first. Otherwise, you might get a lmgtfy link.

Step 2:

Spend time working on it. It does not matter if you are a senior or intern developer, you will reach a roadblock. However, if you get stuck on a problem you cannot be quick to ask a question. Asking a question might give you the answer, but asking a question too early stops you from learning which will hurt you in the long-run. Plus, if you cannot solve a problem or make an attempt to solve it, it defeats the purpose of you being a developer. By researching the problem you will learn how to solve the problem and maybe even learn about some problems that you did not expect.

Step 3:

Ask your question. Asking a question without the previous two steps is pointless because you will not have a good question. Asking a developer a question must come with some background knowledge, logs, reproduction steps, etc. Otherwise, the developer will have to guess what the issue is and run through the N scenarios that pop into their head. Now depending on the quality of the developer they might know what the problem is, but it’s a long shot.

• Softskill
• Engineering