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Depending on your career goals, being the person that everyone approaches for help on finding the right path is a very valuable thing. It means they see you as a leader who can work with other people to help them get things done.

Having an attitude of “I don’t know and won’t make any effort to help you. Leave me alone” is going to negatively impact how people see you, and limit your growth potential in any company.

Maybe that’s fine for you if you just want to write code, but it will stop you from obtaining even team lead type roles where you need to collaborate with others.



The tradeoff here being how much of your time are you willing to dedicate towards helping others, and for what level of task.

As a general rule of thumb, I try to ask "Have you X, Y, or Z'd?" as a quick filter for if the person has engaged with the problem at all. A common example being "Do you know why I'm getting error message X?" "Have you checked the Y logs?"

Ideally, people do some amount of leg work first and proactively state what they've done. Sometimes people will do the leg work, but need to be asked to share the context they've gathered. Sometimes people ask immediately, without any investigation of their own, because you might know and be able to save them time.

Of course, having the full blown belligerent attitude of "I wont make any effort to help you" isn't very welcome, but "You should take a few hours to dive in, if you're still stuck, I'll set aside some time to take a look with you" is pretty reasonable.


But I don't think most of the rewordings suggested here are going to make people want to interact with you. They make you sound like you run your every utterance by HR, legal, and three teams of consultants but they won't keep you from seeming like an asshole.


I don’t want a team lead role. You know what my team lead does most of the time? Meetings, meetings, meetings. Occasionally writes code.

The message I want to send is clear. When you want code, come to me. Everything else, I can’t be bothered.




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