Who is who
Who to Go to for What
Different questions belong to different people, and sending all of them to your manager is the most common and most costly mistake of a first month.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Who signs off a schema change
you asked4Three people were asked before the right one
That two people on the team do not speak to each other
worked out11Worked out from who was never on the same call
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 11 · all two you went and got
Two facts about the shape of a team, neither of which appears on any chart and neither of which anybody would have said out loud.
When a new employee is learning an unfamiliar workflow, managers can see how it fits to understand where time is going before assuming that a slow start is an effort problem.
A useful independent source for this stage of work is Reed.
The six people who mattered most in the first quarter, and what each was for
Introduced, and needed · 2
- Your own manager — met in before you started; needed in week 1
- The person who showed you the system — met in before you started; needed in week 2
Needed, and never introduced · 4
- The person who runs the release — needed in week 2. Found by reading the channel history
- Whoever owns the billing dashboard — needed in week 3. Found by asking in a channel and waiting two days
- The person who approves schema changes — needed in week 4. Found on the fourth attempt
- A colleague two years in, with no title — needed in week 2. Noticed from who answered in the channel
six people · two you were introduced to · six you actually needed · four you had to find yourself
Six people, four of them never introduced by anybody. The one used most often had no formal relationship to you at all. One person's own twelve weeks.
Not every question goes to your manager. Sending all of them there is the default, it is understandable, and it is expensive in both directions.
Why it is expensive
For you: your manager is the slowest route to most answers. They are in meetings, they are the person with the most demands on them, and for a great many practical questions they do not know and will have to ask somebody else — which means your question now takes two round trips instead of one.
For them: a stream of small questions is the main way a new person comes to be experienced as high-maintenance, and the judgement is formed quietly and early.
The sorting
| Kind of question | Who |
|---|---|
| How is this done here | Whoever did it last |
| Where is this thing | A channel, after searching |
| Am I allowed to | Your manager |
| What should I work on | Your manager |
| Is this good enough | Whoever will use it |
| Something is broken and I may have broken it | Whoever owns it, immediately |
| I do not understand what anybody is talking about | A peer, privately |
The last row is the one most often sent to the wrong place. A new person who does not follow the strategy discussion is much better off asking a colleague afterwards than asking the room during, and better off still asking somebody who joined six months ago.
The person you will use most
In the panel above it is a colleague two years in with no title, found by noticing who answered in the channel. That is the usual pattern.
This person is worth cultivating, carefully. They are answering your questions out of goodwill rather than obligation, and goodwill is spendable. Three things keep it:
Ask in public where you can, so that they are choosing to answer rather than being singled out. Say what you have already tried. And write down the answer somewhere, so you do not come back with the same question in a fortnight.
Spreading the load
If you have four or five names, use four or five names.
A new person who sends every question to the same helpful colleague burns that one relationship in about six weeks. The same number of questions spread across five people is unremarkable to all of them.
This is not manipulation; it is the ordinary arithmetic of asking. Ten questions to one person is a demand. Two each to five people is a normal week.
Escalating a small thing
Occasionally you will need to go to your manager with something that feels too small to bother them with.
The useful form states the decision rather than the problem:
Minor thing: I have been told two different conventions for naming these. I am going to use the second unless you tell me otherwise.
That requires no action from them if they agree, which is most of the time, and it gets corrected cheaply if they do not. It is also a different impression from "which should I use?", which is a question, and a question requires an answer.
What to do when you have asked the wrong person
Nothing, beyond moving on. It costs almost nothing and it happens constantly.
What does cost something is apologising at length for having asked. A new person who prefaces every question with regret trains everybody around them to treat questions as an imposition, including themselves, and that is the habit this entire site is written against.
Routing a question you cannot place
Sometimes you do not know which of the categories a question belongs to, which is itself a question.
The cheapest resolution is to ask the routing question rather than the substantive one.
Quick one — who would be the right person to ask about how we handle refunds? I do not want to put it in front of the wrong people.
That is answerable by almost anybody in four seconds, it carries no content that could be wrong, and it frequently produces more than a name: "ask Dan, but he is on leave until Thursday — Priya covers it."
New people route everything through their manager partly because they cannot place the question. Asking where a question goes is a smaller thing than asking the question, and it can safely be asked of anybody.
Keeping a note of who answered what
Thirty seconds after each useful answer, in the list of people.
Not the answer — who gave it. Over a first month this produces an accurate picture of who knows what, built from evidence rather than from titles, and it is the thing that makes the second month feel different.
It also catches the case this note is about. If one name appears against eleven answers and nobody else appears more than twice, you are about to exhaust somebody, and you will see it in the list before you see it in their replies.