How to ask for help at your first dev job (the template I give my mentees)

Every weekend I mentor bootcamp graduates, and the number one thing that decides how fast they grow at their first job is not React or Python. It is how they ask for help. Some ask too early and never build the muscle. Most ask too late, after two days of silent suffering, because they are scared to look stupid.

So here is the rule and the template I give them. Kindly steal it.

The rule: 45 minutes, then ask

Struggle alone for about 45 minutes. Really try: read the error, search, add prints, read the docs. After 45 minutes with no progress you must ask. Not tomorrow. Today. Your team is paying for your time and two days stuck on a missing environment variable is expensive for everybody.

If you are making progress, keep going. The timer is for being stuck, not for being slow.

The template

When you ask, write it like this, in the team channel and not in a DM (more on that below):

• What I am trying to do: one sentence about the goal, not the code.
• What I expected: what should happen.
• What actually happens: the full error, copied as text. Not a photo of your screen taken with your phone.
• What I already tried: even the silly things. This saves the helper 20 minutes and it shows you did the work.
• My best guess: this one is important. Even if your guess is wrong it tells the senior how you are thinking, so they can fix the thinking and not only the bug.

Half the time, by the time you finish writing this you find the answer yourself. That is normal. Post it anyway with "solved, it was X" so the next person can search it.

Ask in public

New people love DMs because it feels safer. But in a DM only one person can help, that person might be busy, and the answer disappears forever. In a channel three people see it, the fastest one answers, and the next junior with the same problem finds it in search. Also seniors are less scary in public than you think. Most of us remember being lost.

After you get help

Say thank you and say what fixed it. If the problem was missing documentation, offer to add it to the README. Juniors who fix the docs after being stuck get noticed, I promise you. It is the easiest way to give back when you feel you are only taking.

One of my mentees started doing this two months ago. Her lead told me last week she is "surprisingly independent". She is not more independent. She just asks better, so she is stuck less.