When I was a Junior and Mid level engineer, I would often send a Slack message to my team members asking for help, only to figure out a solution to my problem 5 seconds after sending the message. Now that I’m a Senior engineer I still do this all the time, but this time the team member in question is: me.
This is what I consider to be the modern version of “rubber duck debugging”. For those unaware, “rubber duck debugging” is where you have a rubber duck sitting on your desk and before going to your co-workers to ask for help, you ask the rubber duck for help. Now obviously the duck isn’t gonna give you an answer but the point is to come up with your own answer in the process of explaining the problem.
In my case, if I have an issue, I will bring up the “Me” message in Slack and will type out a message to myself. I’ll carefully explain the issue, offering followup details, basically everything that I would message a co-worker. In most cases I find that about halfway through my message I’ve figured out the issue. For all other cases I end up sending my message to a co-worker which by that point I would have had time to polish and the message ends up being much more concise than before. And as an added bonus I usually end up with detailed notes about my work after I finish doing this.
