Comment by Simon_O_Rourke

I agree with you on that from the perspective of a senior developer. Far too many times people would come and interrupt me for something that they could have figured out themselves. Sure, it might have been something that I knew offhand and could tell them in 15 seconds, but would take them 2 minutes to research. But it was so very very frustrating to me.

I would get that with junior folks for deeper questions, even, stuff that would take 15-30 minutes to go over with them. I started asking them questions up-front, to try to determine what research and steps they'd taken on their own before asking me. I would generally be pretty gentle with my "go away" patter: "ok, so through the questions I've asked you, I think you should have a few avenues of research that you can pursue on your own; if you're still stuck after that, let me know". But the repeat offenders who just didn't seem to get it... sigh. It was also clear to me from how some of my questions were answered, that often I wasn't suggesting anything they didn't already know; they just didn't feel like doing the research on their own, and wanted someone else to tell them how to do their jobs. So exhausting.

I find these moments to be teaching a person to learn to fish. Not only tell them how to get the answer, but then ask questions to see if they put in the work needed before coming to you. If it persists, maybe address it directly in a one on one meeting. If it's systemic across different people, maybe there is a documentation or organizational problem. Sometimes it's training the person to help themselves, other times it's seeing things that are broken that prevent them from helping themselves. I see this especially in highly complex systems where there are large and multiple teams, and the person needs to be able to work across these areas.

If you're a manager, and those requests are coming from your team, isn't that just part of the job and not an interruption? Giving direction and priority is not a full time job, surely.