I’d like to share the most useful thing I’ve learned in my career so far, which I found through working with the excellent manager I had in my first software role.
Knowledge work is problem-solving, not ‘my problem getting solved’.
Sitting with a difficult unsolved problem is not the same as being stuck. You certainly aren’t stuck just because your first stab at a solution didn’t work. You could certainly ask your mentor/supervisor for the answer: eight out of 10 times they will hold the answers you need – however, by asking them, they have done some of your work for you, and more importantly you miss out on the knowledge you would have gained by getting there the slow way.
However, in the moment, this will not often feel like a good enough reason to struggle on. So I make it about respecting other people’s time, not about the pay-off I’ll get from long-term self-improvement. Taking a (possibly irrational) view that an expert colleague’s time is worth at least 10 times my own encourages pretty much the same attitude toward work.
Because isn’t it funny how one query leads to another… leads to a habit of relying on the same one or two people to give you quick fixes and take the pain away? It’s addictive.
I think it helps to have a little bit of self-belief that the answer is within reach, that you have not exhausted all good routes of investigation yet, and that those remaining routes are almost always easier to explore than you think.
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