<story><title>It Hurts to Ask [pdf]</title><url>https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/rbenabou/files/ihta_august_7.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jjice</author><text>Anecdotally, when I started at my current job, it was made clear to me that I should ask questions and not think twice about it. They said to ask in our public engineering slack channel (remote work) so everyone could see and have more eyes on it for answers plus future searching. It was such a great experience, and I put a lot of that on the culture of questions my boss put into place.&lt;p&gt;When we had more and more engineers join, including interns, I made sure they heard the same thing I did and felt comfortable asking &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; questions. I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can&amp;#x27;t just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). I will repeat it to the point where it&amp;#x27;s likely annoying during mentoring and onboarding meetings, but people will be very open with their questions, which I&amp;#x27;m very happy with. It takes a bit of extra time out of everyone&amp;#x27;s day to respond to questions, but you&amp;#x27;re unblocking someone in 2 chunks of 10 minutes (mentor and mentee) which saves the mentee upwards of hours, and this can compound with future situations if they don&amp;#x27;t have a complete understanding of the situation.&lt;p&gt;I really appreciate a question friendly culture and I would never want to work at a place that isn&amp;#x27;t like that again.</text></comment>
<story><title>It Hurts to Ask [pdf]</title><url>https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/rbenabou/files/ihta_august_7.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Scanning through this I couldn&amp;#x27;t find much on the ratio of askers to askees (what the paper seems to call Receivers and Senders, respectively).&lt;p&gt;That seems like a major factor - there&amp;#x27;s the classic example of the IT person who&amp;#x27;s constantly being asked to help with relatively basic tasks.  If that&amp;#x27;s their defined job, that&amp;#x27;s not a problem - but if they have other responsibilities that are not being met due to constant requests for assistance, it becomes a problem.&lt;p&gt;A similar example is found in areas with a high concentration of homeless people - i.e. if there is just one homeless person in a neighborhood, people might go out of their way to be helpful, or if they were asking for money people might be willing to give them a few dollars - but if there are 100 homeless people in a neighborhood, then treating them all equally would mean shelling out several hundred dollars, a more significant burden.&lt;p&gt;Once a problem becomes organizational-scale or societal-scale, then this focus on individual relationships no longer makes much sense.  In the former case, hiring a person (or team) whose sole job is to provide technical assitance is the solution; in the latter, some kind of social safety net aimed at keeping people off the street is needed.</text></comment>