> Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to.
This is such a fine line though, encourage developers to ask questions, but they also need to try problem-solving before they immediately go asking for help. If I _consistently_ get asked for help on problems that I can solve it within 5-10 minutes using no “company knowledge“ (just plain debugging), then that cements someone as “junior” in my mind.
Contrast that with the people who ask lots of questions but they are well thought out questions that require knowledge of the inner workings of the system.
“This isn’t working” vs “I can’t figure out X works, I tried Y and Z but that gave me this error that I don’t understand but I did find….”
This is such a fine line though, encourage developers to ask questions, but they also need to try problem-solving before they immediately go asking for help. If I _consistently_ get asked for help on problems that I can solve it within 5-10 minutes using no “company knowledge“ (just plain debugging), then that cements someone as “junior” in my mind.
Contrast that with the people who ask lots of questions but they are well thought out questions that require knowledge of the inner workings of the system.
“This isn’t working” vs “I can’t figure out X works, I tried Y and Z but that gave me this error that I don’t understand but I did find….”