Comment by dmoy
1 month ago
Yea the best teams I've ever been on have always had someone like Tim.
The best best teams I've been on, Tim's helpfulness osmoses onto other people, and instead of Tim always being the one, the process goes like this:
1. Dev gets stuck
2. Dev attempts to unstick self for appropriate amount of time given problem and probability of self-unsticking given resources (e.g. some stuff is easier to search for internally, or dismantle and go piece by piece)
3. Dev announces "hey I'm blocked on XYZ thing"
4. Whoever knows the most about that topic (not always Tim, but often Tim) puts that as like their highest priority thing, and almost always jumps in right away to help (unless they're like ignoring chat cus they're in the zone)
Works great especially if you do #4 at some break time (like say lunch or standup), and everyone has enough things to work on that they can do their own internal CPU pipelining and work on other stuff until someone has time to help unstick them
Problem on a lot of teams is people skip over #2 in my experience.
Good devs always do #2, bad devs skip it.
That's easy to solve. When they ask me it might take an hour or two until I come back to them. If they were just trying to us me as a rubber duck the problem will have been solved by then. And it's not only devs. Also PMs have this behaviour. Sitting it out before asking what they need makes most question vanish.
Extra points for the ones that sit down at step 4 and lay out all the things they've already tried so the context on the problem is clear