It Hurts to Ask [pdf]
Anecdotally, when I started at my current job, it was made clear to me that I should ask questions and not think twice about it. They said to ask in our public engineering slack channel (remote work) so everyone could see and have more eyes on it for answers plus future searching. It was such a great experience, and I put a lot of that on the culture of questions my boss put into place.<p>When we had more and more engineers join, including interns, I made sure they heard the same thing I did and felt comfortable asking <i>any</i> questions. I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). I will repeat it to the point where it's likely annoying during mentoring and onboarding meetings, but people will be very open with their questions, which I'm very happy with. It takes a bit of extra time out of everyone's day to respond to questions, but you're unblocking someone in 2 chunks of 10 minutes (mentor and mentee) which saves the mentee upwards of hours, and this can compound with future situations if they don't have a complete understanding of the situation.<p>I really appreciate a question friendly culture and I would never want to work at a place that isn't like that again.