How to ask senior devs for help?

Ask questions, but don't expect the senior devs to do the work for you. There is so much help out there. Try to find it. In some cases I've hired very experienced people in my field to help me solve complex problems, perhaps UI issues that don't stop the program from working, but which would be nice if there was a better way of doing things.

Note that I personally believe in figuring things out for yourself. But if you have a process to follow and step 1 has failed, please don't try step 2. Try to figure out what's wrong with step 1, and then ask the senior / experienced developers for help.

So while I have not gotten into the programming side of things yet. I can say personally working in the IT support side your never going to know everything. And when I first started that's all I did was ask questions. I feel like in any job they expect you to do so its how you learn.

If anything I feel like if someone was not asking questions. Then there is something wrong. I however personally when Im stuck on something I will ask a more senior colleague, in a way that shows I at least made a solid attempt unless Im just completely stuck.

This way you are at least showing that your willing to try and think something through before just saying hey can you come help. So it does not come off as them doing all the work ect.

Hi,

You just have to ask. Senior developers are used to receiving questions, and most of us love to help and advise others. It is a mutual benefit; that way, we refresh our knowledge and consolidate concepts and ideas.

I recommend that you consider before asking that you have at least identified the problem or are clear about your doubt; try to find the answer by yourself beforehand. By the time you get help, there will already be a base from which to start.

When asking, it is useful to give context about what you are doing and inform your working environment: code editor, language, libraries, frameworks, operating system, etc.

Never stop asking. Some people will respond to you, and others will not. If you are respectful, you will have no problem.

Remember, there are no dumb questions. You will never learn anything if you do not ask questions of others or yourself.

I couldn't call myself a senior developer if I won't be open to mentor and help other developers with less experience...

From my own journey I learnt the following useful things:

• No question is too dumb. You may laugh about the silly thing you asked later but ask it. I once had to have someone else point out to me that my external screen was not switched on and that is my laptop appeared to not be working.
• Read everything you can find about dev and in particular the tech you work with. Experiment with it, almost anything you do can be undone if you do break something. I have deleted crucial things before but learnt a lot in fixing the trail of destruction.
• Be willing to learn. Take notes if that helps or find other ways of learning. After each project you work on summarise what you learnt.
• Communicate. Let the senior devs know you want to learn but ask them to tell you if you are asking too many questions or bothering them too much. Usually though they are happy to help and teach others.
• If you work at a company where mentorship is not important to the company and they do not really care about how you progress then consider finding somewhere else to work.
• Keep track of your skills and the sort of things you are needing to ask, over time you start seeing progression and that helps you realise you are levelling up.

In short junior devs should have a good grasp of the basics of the programming language they work in, if you are asking questions about things like types (strings, ints, booleans) or writing basic logic then perhaps you need to revisit that and get good at that. But you cannot be expected to know about big architectural things or how to make a brand new table in a database, those things come with time and experience. By the end of the first year being a junior dev I should be able to give you e.g. a well spec'ed sign up form and you can implement just the form part with little guidance. But if I gave you a spec for the entire sign up process on a website I would expect to need to guide you through some steps in the process.

This was a good question. I agree to everything people have said above. Be humble, be enthusiastic to learn, but also be aware if you're in a toxic work environment.

I was in a job last year where I found out later I was hired to do part of a job that the senior dev didn't make time for. He was out to get me from the start, first ghosting me the first two weeks, then inconsistent communication and taking every opportunity to try to make me look "bad", especially to my manager and in front of our team. I was chastised for "asking too many questions" (about the codebase I inherited), and then shortly after, "he's not asking enough questions".

Just do your best, assume people have positive intentions(until proven otherwise), and try to find any way of becoming a valued member of the team.

I take the following approaches when I need help from an experienced developer:

• Whenever I am assigned a task, I always ask who is the best person to ask for information and coding help if needed

• Whenever I am assigned to a task, I always ask if there are any documents related to that task that could help me understand things better (not everything can be googled).

• Before reaching out to a senior, I'll build the necessary setup so we can quickly navigate to the problem. If my lead developer is not in the same location as me, I will write a team meeting invitation (email) describing the problem

• If the senior reacts with an aggressive attitude (this is not uncommon), I politely ask him if he has time for a coffee break and try to build a relaxing conversation

• I also always thank everyone who takes the time to help me, even if the person did not manage to solve my problem

• When I am frustrated, I share my feelings and reasons with my manager. Sometimes the solution is a workshop.

I think the most important thought is to understand your feelings and current skills and to take the time to communicate them clearly.

You are not alone in feeling this way! I know how scary this is, and I found Julia Evans' guide to asking good questions really helpful to me. I hope it helps you too!

jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/

One option is to query your teammates that are also reasonably junior, as they may have figured out the one point that finally made a solution obvious (in many cases some tidbits within the product/organization are globally useful and may not be obvious to more senior people). Even if your peers haven't figured out a similar problem, the solution or ideas you learn from them discussing your problem may help, and ideas you think of during your investigation may be useful to them in return.