The Person Who Answers Everything

Why they exist

Not because it is their job. Because they are the kind of person who answers, which is a disposition rather than a role, and because they remember being new recently enough that the questions still make sense to them.

This is worth understanding, because it tells you what the relationship actually is: a sequence of favours. Nobody has allocated them to you.

The risk

You will use them up.

The pattern is predictable: everything goes to them because everything is answered, the volume rises through weeks two and three, and somewhere in week four or five you start noticing their replies getting shorter. By then the relationship is damaged and you have begun rationing your questions — which is how the panel above ends up with two items taking six and nine weeks.

The rationing is the expensive part. It arrives quietly, it is never discussed, and it undoes the single most valuable thing you had.

Four habits that prevent it

Ask in public. Put the question in the channel rather than to them directly. They will often answer anyway, and the difference is enormous: in a channel they are choosing to help, and in a direct message they are being required to.

Say what you tried. A question that shows twenty minutes of effort costs them four minutes instead of fifteen, and it reads as respect for their time rather than as delegation of your work.

Write the answer down. Every answer they give you goes in your own notes, and ideally into whatever shared place exists. The fastest way to exhaust somebody is to ask them the same thing twice in a month.

Spread it. Four or five names, not one. Covered in the previous note and it is mostly about this person.

Saying thank you in a way that is worth something

Not more thanks. Specifics, occasionally, in public.

That answer about the retry limit saved me most of a day — I have added it to the runbook so the next person finds it.

Two effects. The person gets visible credit, which nobody else is giving them for any of this. And the answer is now written down, which is the only thing that actually reduces the load on them.

When they are also the bottleneck

Sometimes the person who answers everything is answering everything, for everybody, and it is costing them their week.

You are not responsible for fixing that and you can avoid contributing to it. The two things that help are the ones above: ask in public, and write down what they tell you. A new joiner who leaves behind three documented answers has repaid most of what they took.

What not to do is point out, in month two, that the team depends too heavily on one person. It is true, everybody knows, and from a new person it lands as criticism of the one colleague who was kind to you.

If there is nobody like this

Some teams do not have one, and it is worth recognising early rather than concluding that you are being frozen out.

In that case the answers have to come from reading, from history, and from asking in public and waiting. It is slower and it works, and the section on asking is written for exactly this case.

Finding the second one

The single most effective protection against exhausting your first helpful colleague is to find a second.

They exist. In any team of more than six there are usually two or three people who answer, and the first one you find is simply the one who happened to reply first.

Watching the channel for a fortnight tells you who the others are, and the twenty-minute conversations in the note on meeting people are how you make it possible to ask them. A name you have spoken to once will answer you; a name you have never spoken to will often not.

Two or three such relationships, established in the first month at a cost of an hour in total, are what make the second and third months feel completely different from the first — and the difference is entirely about not having to ration.

What they get out of it

Worth understanding, because it changes how to behave towards them.

Mostly: the pleasure of being useful, and the standing that comes from being the person who knows. Neither is small and neither is illegitimate.

What they do not get is credit, because nothing about it appears anywhere. The hours spent answering are invisible in every record of their work, and in most organisations their own manager has no idea how much of it they do.

Which is why the thank-you in public, naming the specific thing, is worth more than it looks. It is frequently the only evidence of any of it that will ever exist.