How Alignable Made Me Stop Worrying About Asking For Help
As a new engineer, asking for help can sometimes feel like a double edged sword. On one hand, I often find myself worried I’ll ask for help too often, and become an annoyance or a burden. Plus, as a new hire, I want to show that I can solve problems on my own. On the other hand, if I try to accomplish everything independently, I can end up struggling for hours to solve a problem I just don’t have enough information to fix. When I feel uncomfortable asking for help, I act based on my instinct and “best guesses”, which often leads me to make small mistakes. If I continue to stubbornly work on my own, these small misunderstandings can turn into bigger issues.
Usually, I default to asking for help, even when it makes me feel a bit less smart or a bit more annoying. However, at times, the culture surrounding software engineering has made me feel reluctant to ask for help. Many engineers I’ve met associate working independently with competence and strength, and sometimes even assume that you would only work with others because you aren’t smart or resourceful enough to solve a problem on your own. (This attitude also exists in my former profession, teaching, where most people end up creating their own individualized, controlled environment without much input from other teachers.) When I entered the job market a few months ago, I was worried about running up against company cultures that discouraged collaboration. Like many new engineers, my greatest fear was having a manager who left me alone with a giant code base and expected me to find all the answers myself.
Instead of discouraging me from seeking help, Alignable’s culture removed some of the mental barriers that kept me from to asking for support. My manager and “engineering buddy” kept track of my progress and offered to look over my shoulder during the most anxiety-provoking parts of coding (for example, pushing to master). My “engineering buddy” shared his own experience of being new, feeling eager to prove himself, and struggling with when and how to ask for help. My co-workers gave presentations describing the basic layout of the website, giving me the scaffolding I needed to start coding on my own.
Most importantly, my coworkers treated me as an equal, despite the fact that I’d only recently graduated from a bootcamp. Everyone at the company - from the CTO to my engineering buddy – wanted to chat with me about coding and hear my thoughts. A few weeks after starting, I described a tricky bug to my manager. I was surprised when he asked for my thoughts on the issue: not as a way to test my skills, but because he believed I might have a key insight. That’s when I realized that getting support from my manager was not as simple as him providing a service to me: the problem solving process was valuable for both of us. Over the next month, my attitude towards asking for help shifted. Instead of seeing my requests as tapping into a reserve of goodwill (that could eventually run out), asking for help became an opportunity to struggle with a hard problem together.
Asking for help became an opportunity to struggle with a hard problem together.
When I was a student at a coding bootcamp, I treated bugs I encountered as mine and mine alone to struggle with. Teachers, tutors and fellow students could ask questions and offer advice from a distance, but only I went through the process of getting confused, flailing around, and, finally, arriving at an answer. I often felt like I was problem solving in front of, rather than with, my teachers and peers. At Alignable, I felt more like my coworkers and I went through the problem solving process together: becoming confused together, coming up with possible solutions together, doing research together and, finally, finding a solution together.
Once I realized that I had a safety net in the form of my manager and coworkers, working independently with a big code base felt less like a scary problem and more like an engaging challenge. Rather than feeling pressured to understand everything myself, I enjoyed making partial progress on my own and identifying the issues that would be better solved collaboratively. After about a month, I felt like I’d struck a comfortable balance between working together and alone. Now, having worked at Alignable for six weeks, I already feel more comfortable asking for and receiving help than I did after six months of coding bootcamp (and a couple semesters of college software engineering classes). I have my coworkers at Alignable to thank.
