It’s hard for some of us to be vulnerable and ask for help. It’s hard for me. I’ll always be grateful to those who went out of their way to help me unconditionally.
It is 1998 and my project was to write a corporate directory web application. It would be the third time I’d written the app, the first time with the backend a mainframe NOMAD database and mainframe web server and the second time with SQL/IIS. This time I would be using a Netscape LDAP backend. The problem was the official LDAP directory was owned by the team we were at war with and I was under strict orders not to collaborate with them. (When I say “at war with”, I mean some real nasty corporate infighting;details left out to protect the innocent.) My boss asked me to set up and run our own LDAP server so that we would have no dependency on the other team and we could eventually take over their business. I had no idea how to do this. I tried on my own and hit many roadblocks. It was slow going. I took a risk and reached out to Trevor, the senior engineer working on LDAP for the opposing team and asked him for pointers. Trevor would have been justified to point me at some docs and leave it at that. After all, we were building something his team had the charter for and had already built. But he didn’t just give me a courtesy answer. He came down to my cubicle.
He came down to my cubicle and pulled up a chair beside me. There would be no organization talk. No ownership talk. No roadmap talk. Just helping me set up the LDAP server, schema, and populate the data. He spent a several hours patiently tutoring me. By the end of the session, I had a working LDAP server with data loading. The core function of my web app was working in a couple of days.
Trevor was anything but naive - he knew my boss was trying an end rund around his team. It taught me the valuable lesson to help and to be helped. To just focus on the work. His willingness to help me without condition left me forever in his debt. Later, when someone would ask me for help and when I was at my best, I would channel Trevor.
Early in my career, I learned a lot by sitting side by side with a senior engineer. Vito and Maria walking me through system builds. Howard showing me how to do RSCS modifications. Bob, showing me how to do operating system modifications. Rich stepping me through a dump file to find the root cause of a crash. I learned so much just watching them interact with the systems and/or leading me through the interactions. Even supposedly simple things like how they used the command line and editor. They all helped freely and if anything encouraged me to ask for help.
As I got more experienced, it became harder for me to to ask for help. Being an introvert and a self solver has the benifit of being able to work independently. I wish I had been able to reach out and ask for help more often; it would have been exponentially more efficient and lead to more human connections.
I found as I progressed in tech, knowledge was currency. Some would spend it librially, some hoarded it, and some used it as a weapon. At Microsoft, the company introducted something called “Growth Mindset” which tried to shift the company from “know-it-all” thinking to “learn-it-all”. In principal, if was fantastic and in many cases actually was. However, it also meant “Have a growth mindset, and listen to me.”
Is there a lesson here? Can’t ChatGPT be your always available tutor? Maybe, but I’d rather have a Trevor.