September 2007. I'm still a student but got my first job as junior software engineer working 30 hours a week after my classes.
As a junior person I was assigned a mentor. His name is Vitalik. He is kind and extremely smart. He is well respected and works on important projects.
I got lucky, he was a catch and other people got matched with way less brilliant engineers.
I sit next to Vitalik. He is older, but we can chat casually and I can ask him questions.
I work on my project and hit some problem, I turn my head and ask him if he knows the solution. He replied. I did it again 5 minutes later with another question.
He turned to me (very slightly irritated - I can see his frustration, but I admire him, because I don't have as much patience as him). He says to me:
You cannot come to me with a question as a first stop. You try to solve it yourself by thinking, then you google and do research online. After trying for 15 minutes you can come to me and say, "I have this issue, here are the things I tried, but hit those specific problems. Can you help me?"
This stuck for me for the past 19 years.
When I interact with younger people, I try to do the same thing Vitalik taught me all those years ago, explain and try to help.
But I do get frustrated interacting with older colleagues that do not follow same rules.
Fast forward to 2026. I open Slack and I see messages from engineers who are past 30. They post a question on Slack and tag specific people.
They do it without trying anything personally first. And wowadays, you can get better and faster answer by typing exact same question in your Claude Code!
Type a question -> discuss -> think. Then if something is still unclear do post to Slack and do ask people.
If you ask someone a question directly without doing any prep work you show that you are being lazy, have no agency to solve the issue and also don't respect other people's time. You are just passing problem you have to other people.
Pinging someone on Slack, so that that person stop what they are doing and then go and find answer to your question is such an irresponsible use of time and resources. Please do type your question in your AI tool of choice first, think about it and be mindful of people's time.