Thoughts on "questions".

As a junior Dev, I understand asking too many simple questions is irritating and usually not welcome, but, is not asking any questions at all considered a sign of disinterest or "zoning out" or lack of curiosity etc etc ?

Do people think that much ??

I figure the distinction lies in "I tried figuring this out but I'm stuck on this particular thing" and "can you show me how to do the entire thing".

It's a balance between being autonomous but promptly signalling for when you start banging your head against a thing.

The distinction for me is always wether I had the chance to prepare or not.

I cannot mentor someone when my state of mind is clusterfuck, because I'm occupied with completely different things.

Mentoring requires to be relaxed, have time and being able to prepare answers & questions of the interns project.

When an intern suddenly pops up in front of my desk and says he cannot work cause he's completely lost, it's bad TM. Not always preventable, but it should be really the last option.

Send me an e-mail at least 1h before a meeting...

I expect the content of the e-mail to be precise so I know how I must reorganize my work time.

"need help. nothing works" is the kind of e-mail where I will get pissed. ;)

All in all, my mentoring style is simple: I'll take all the time the intern needs, as long as the intern respects that I'll need time to prepare myself.

@IntrusionCM @ltlian insightful

... as it was only implied above: I don't expect (require might be an better word) an intern to ask any question at all.

It's my job as a mentor to question the knowledge of the intern and my own knowledge, too.

After all, I have the responsibility for his behaviour and if I don't know what the intern is doing, I'm not doing my job.

@IntrusionCM That's a great way of looking at this.

All you have to do is to find one developer who rather spends time helping you than working on his own assignment. You will get all the help you need.

As said before, one cannot choose these extremes of asking questions all the time and not asking at all

Like anytjint in real life, people respect and adjust to people who do their homework and show interest in doing things independently unless it is too hard to crack

Not asking any questions or discussing your process at all is a sign of disinterest, but so is asking too many basic questions. The questions you ask should show that you have put thought into it. The mentors should make sure that you are going in the right direction and possibly save you time.

Don't ask stuff before you've exhausted RTFM and DDG.

@asgs @hashedram @electrineer @Fast-Nop thanks for the advice guys !

You know you're doing good work when the mentor is learning with you

@electrineer oooooo that's gold !

I will just answer the last question: Yes.

If your output is fine I doubt anyone cares, the important thing is to ask questions if you're really stuck. Depending on the distribution of responsibilities this can also overlap with (implicit) reporting on your progress, which is generally welcome in most cases.

Before asking a question but after phrasing it, type the exact sentence into google while omitting pronouns. Very often I can't find details on something because I completely misunderstand the problem and the only searchable link between my interpretation and the true problem is a single question on StackOverflow where someone made the exact same mistake and promptly got corrected.