In one of my previous posts, I wrote about an analogy on how interaction with design docs evolves as you grow as a Software Engineer. I recently noticed a similar evolution regarding seeking help at work.
How you ask for help evolves as you grow into your career:
- An L3 (Junior Engineer) can ask for help directly (initially).
- There are many things you don’t know. Nobody will blame you for asking about small stuff initially. “Initially” is the keyword here since people will soon get impatient if you ask about the same stuff.
- The projects you work on are simple so people can often help you quickly without spending significant time.
- An L4 (Mid Level Engineer) needs to be more independent.
- Your projects are more difficult than an L3, so when you get blocked, it requires more effort from the team to unblock you.
- Independence is critical at this level. You need to develop skills for investigation and debugging.
- If you still can’t unblock yourself, do your due diligence before bringing the issue to the team’s attention. This is a good opportunity to spin out a quick one-pager to provide context on the blocker and list what you have tried.
- An L5 (Senior Engineer) needs to be independent and scalable.
- This is a bit tricky now. While you investigate blockers yourself you need to be mindful about your time.
- Since you will be working on more ambiguous problems and unknown areas, trying to become an expert in every area won’t scale.
- For every blocker, you need to judge if it’s better to debug it yourself or if it’s better to use your relationship with another expert to ask for their guidance/hints.
All of the above happens naturally. As an L4, my scope was small and I always had time to debug my blockers. I was encouraged to become an expert in the areas I was assigned.
As I grew towards L5, I was assigned a bigger scope and sometimes multiple projects. If I debugged a blocker too deeply, I would have missed up on deliverables. So I had no choice but to ask for help from other experts to expedite my project.