"It's good to try finding a solution yourself, but ask for help before it turns into some nonsensical monstrosity." — Raph
With Mashup Garage, it's important that we give as much as we take. The more we collaborate and share, the faster we grow individually and as a company. The easier things and solving solutions will become for everyone.
We work at an open space. The collective knowledge of everyone makes it easy to solve problems or find alternate solutions to our tasks.
We encourage asking questions but it's also important that we try to figure things out ourselves. Do not get other people to solve your problems because everyone needs to pull their weight.
Instead of:
"Hey, any idea how I can do this?"
Try this:
"Hey, I've tried this approach so many times but I still couldn't figure it out. Any idea how can I solve my problem?"
If you're going to do a one on one session, sometimes it might be a good idea to share that knowledge to other teammates who might be needing to learn the same thing. A simple offer to our #slackoverflow channel will help spread the knowledge faster.
At 5pm, we have a Slackbot reminder asking "what are you up to now?". It's a nice way to share to other members what you're up to now.
This is not our daily standup and it is not required for everyone to participate. Teams & projects hold their own daily standups.
We internally developed a habit that if something is taking you 4 hours already to figure something out, maybe it's time to just give up and start asking for help. Sometimes, you have to let go of your ego, call for help, and hope that someone in our team have experienced a similar problem and/or can find an alternative solution to your problem. (Recent proposals from the team involves changing this to become 1 hour now)
Because you know, team work makes the dream work.