Help! I Need Somebody

Asking for Help Is Not Announcing a Problem

Sasha Rosenbaum, the show's first returning guest, and Dave Gerding, an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago who also does management consulting, take up how to ask for help, with Matty's voice shot after the Agile 2014 conference. Dave teaches the McCarthy protocols, a management doctrine published under an open source license, whose cornerstone skill is asking for help, "which is kind of a funny idea since everyone thinks that they do it and almost nobody does." In the protocol you say "will you help me?", which separates asking from what he jokingly calls announcing a problem. Walking into a room and saying "boy, my shoes are really dirty" is announcing a problem, since you haven't asked anyone for anything.

Announcing a problem, Dave says, is a cop-out that lets you avoid being vulnerable, and it isn't common in tech to lead with vulnerability. Sasha adds that it's a two-way street: it takes confidence both to ask and to respond, and even if you can't help you shouldn't shut people down so that they don't want to ask again.

Help From People You Don't Know

Matty points out that with open source you don't call a support hotline, you go to IRC or a mailing list, and the community has to welcome you (The Ship Show did an episode on this, linked below). Sasha says she gets few responses when she posts on social networks or Stack Overflow, and goes directly to people she knows. Matty says crowdsourcing on Twitter only works if the people who know the answer follow you, and now that people who know Chef follow him, he needs that help less, which is a vicious cycle. Trevor's approach is to find out who the right person is and ask, and Matty says that if you say Nathen Harvey three more times "he will show up in the podcast like Beetlejuice."

Dave's tip for small open source projects is to kick $10 into their PayPal donate button before asking anything, which in his anecdotal experience gets a better response. He says not asking is "leaving a huge pile of free value on the table," and points out how cheap transacting is. Sasha adds that people you tag or message are usually happy to help, because it makes them feel good and gives them a chance to share their view of their product.

Please Don't Let Me Google That for You

Sasha says the person you ask can go wrong in two ways: by leading you down the wrong path instead of admitting they don't know, and by being condescending, like sending you a "let me Google this for you" link. Trevor adds there's a difference between that and asking "did you Google the issue first?", which Dave used to ask him at work, and Dave apologizes to Trevor and the entire internet.

Matty describes the help vampire, from a Stack Exchange article: someone who asks what everyone has asked, seems unwilling to Google, and expects you to do their thinking. Because experts get deluged, he suggests showing you've done due diligence, and vouching by retweeting someone's question to people you know. Sasha distinguishes strangers, where she does her research first, from a coworker, where she asks first ("what are the best recommended steps?") and then Googles the hell out of it.

Ask the Duck

Dave says asking a person is different emotional work from posting to a group, and that he's often had the problem reveal itself as soon as someone leans into his frame. Sasha recommends the Ask the Duck article on rubber duck debugging: you don't need the other party to speak, just to phrase your problem as a question, which lets another part of your brain look at it. Dave says he'll go get a rubber duck tomorrow, and Matty says he had a Dalek on his desk but "you would just get exterminated." Dave: "It has one answer for all problems."

Dave says the question format softens ego, because we're often "solving the solution instead of solving the problem," and asking makes us drop the concept we thought was right. Asking a human, he adds, also gets you socialization and sometimes something better than you'd have come up with.

Too Junior, Too Senior

Sasha says the ego problem hits people at the beginning and the end of a career. Beginners feel they must solve everything themselves and that asking makes them look weak. Senior people feel trapped by the need to keep their authority, while "best senior people that I know are absolutely not afraid of admitting that they don't know." Consulting taught her that "you don't know anything," so there's no shame in asking. She notes the waste when you spend two days on a problem that someone at the next desk solved yesterday. Dave calls it sad when executives won't be vulnerable, since they seal their own fate, cut themselves off from new ideas and stop anyone sharing them. Trevor says practicing this teaches you who your go-to people are.

Boundaries, No, and Asking for Help Asking for Help

Trevor raises the excuse that you'll be bothering someone. Matty says the answer is boundaries, and that a tweet is low-cost, while cornering a speaker at a conference isn't. He cites Seth Vargo's Twitter bio saying he doesn't reply to technical support questions, so tweeting one at him would violate his boundary. In an office you can just ask: "how do I ask you for help in a way that is effective?" Dave: "will you help me ask you for help?" Sasha prefers asynchronous chat over "do you have a second?" because it lets her finish her own task first.

For people who freeze after one no, Matty says offer options instead of saying no: help in an hour, or write up your question and he'll come find you. Dave thinks that when people say they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings, they're often afraid of their own being hurt by hearing no. His advice for someone hearing no all the time is "you have to ask for help about asking for help. You just got to pop a level and go meta for a minute." Sasha says she finds it hard to ask in her personal life but easy at work, because she focuses on results, and suggests others do the same. Dave says gender is clearly a big parameter and that, stereotypically, men are more likely to fall into the trap of not being vulnerable. His last word is "do it more."

• The Ship Show - Asked and Answered: http://theshipshow.com/2013/04/asked-answered/
• Sascha Bates - Whip it Good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Fcb_MCzY0
• The Help Vampire Problem http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem
• Rubber Duck Debugging - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
• Rubber Duck Problem Solving - http://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/

Check Outs

Matt

• Chef Meetup - Testing Cookbooks and Chef Hack day (aug 19) http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Chef-User-Group/events/193996782/
• Scroll Down To Riker http://scrolldowntoriker.com
• Registration is open for Chef Community Summit https://www.arresteddevops.com/chefcommunity