Asking
Asking in Public
A question in a channel is answered faster, by more people, and by somebody you would never have known to ask.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
How to get a staging database password
you asked2The answer was one sentence and had no owner
Why the retry limit is three and not five
you asked9The reason existed and was in one person's head
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 9 · all two you went and got
Two answers that existed only in somebody's head. The second sat in the question list for a month before it was asked.
Before adding another mandatory check-in, a team evaluating workforce analytics for new hires can ask whether the real issue is unclear ownership, missing access, or an overloaded first-week schedule.
A useful independent source for this stage of work is Glassdoor.
Where the answers came from, sorted by how the question was asked
Which branch to start from, asked in a direct message
you asked2Answered in forty minutes by the one person asked
Which of two deploy guides is current, asked in the channel
you asked6Answered in four minutes by somebody you had never spoken to
Who approves a schema change, asked in the channel
you asked4Answered by two people, who disagreed, which was the real finding
How to get a staging password, asked in a direct message
you asked2Answered, and then asked again by somebody else a fortnight later
Why the retry limit is three, asked in the channel
you asked9Answered by the person who had set it, who was not on the team
That Thursday standup is optional
told5Volunteered in the channel by somebody reading a different question
six things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 5 · the other five you went and got
Six questions, four of them asked in a channel and two in private. The channel questions were answered faster, by people nobody would have thought to ask, and two of them helped somebody else later. One person's own twelve weeks.
Ask in the channel rather than in a message to one person. It is faster, it reaches people you did not know existed, and it costs the person who answers less than being singled out does.
It is also the thing new people find hardest to do.
Why it is faster
A direct message is a queue of one. If that person is in a meeting, you wait.
A channel is a queue of everybody who happens to look. In the panel above, the channel questions were answered in minutes and the private ones in the better part of an hour — and one of the channel answers came from somebody who was not on the team and could not have been asked directly, because you did not know they existed.
Why it costs the answerer less
This is the part that is counter-intuitive.
A direct message creates an obligation. It is addressed to one person, it is visible only to them, and if they do not answer, that is a decision they have made about you.
A channel question creates no obligation on anybody. Whoever has the answer and a free moment replies. People answer channel questions readily and resent private ones occasionally, and the difference is entirely about whether they chose it.
Why it is hard
Because a channel is an audience, and the question you are about to ask reveals what you do not know.
That is real and it does not go away by being argued with. What helps is the observation that the audience is not watching. A channel question is read by people scanning, who will have forgotten it by lunch, and the mental picture of a room going quiet is simply not what happens.
What people do remember, over months, is the person who asked good questions and the person who asked the same thing three times.
The form
Trying to work out which of the two deploy guides is current — the one in the handbook and the one in the repository say different things about the staging step. I have searched the channel back to the summer. Is one of them the real one, or should I be asking somebody specific?
Four parts: what you are trying to do, what the specific obstacle is, what you have already tried, and an easy exit for anybody who does not know the answer but knows who does.
The last part matters more than it looks. It gives somebody with partial knowledge a way to be useful, which is how most channel questions actually get resolved.
Where to put it
The team's own channel, not a general one, unless the question is plainly about something else's territory.
If the organisation has a channel for a particular system, that is better than your team's: the people there are the ones who know, and questions are what the channel is for.
When to use a direct message instead
Four cases.
When it is about you rather than the work — your objectives, your probation, something you are worried about.
When it concerns one person's work specifically and might read as public criticism of it.
When you have asked in the channel twice and had no answer, in which case a private message to one named person, with a link to the channel question, is the right next step.
And when it is urgent and you know exactly who can answer.
The by-product
Two of the six questions in the panel above helped somebody else later, because the answer was sitting in a channel where the next person searched.
That is worth knowing because it changes what asking in public is. It is not merely a cheaper way of getting your own answer. It is the only mechanism most teams have for turning one person's knowledge into something a second person can find, and a new person asking well in public does more documenting in a month than most teams manage in a year.
The first one is the only hard one
Almost everybody finds the first public question difficult and almost nobody finds the fifth one difficult.
What changes is not confidence. It is the discovery that nothing happens: somebody answers, the channel moves on, and by the afternoon nobody including you remembers it.
The mental picture that makes the first question hard — a room going quiet, people looking up — is a picture of an office, and it is simply not what a channel is. A channel is people scanning on the way to something else.
If it helps, make the first one trivially easy to answer. Something you are nearly certain of, phrased as a check. The point is not the answer; it is to get the first one out of the way on a question where nothing is at stake.