How to ask for help/guidance when you are stuck

[JaviTrek]

I know some of you aren't too experienced with coding or web development. It's okay, we are in school and we are still learning. You'll have me as your team lead and I'll be able to hopefully guide you and help you if you don't understand something or if you are stuck in your development.

Besides learning how to code, we also need to learn some good work ethic. This will help you a lot when you land an internship/job and you don't want to look like an annoying kid to the senior developer (who's prob really busy dealing with complex problems). Here is some advice in how to ask for help:

Show you've put effort into understanding the problem.

You should be able to have a reasonable discussion about the matter. This doesn't mean debating the implementation nuances of a complicated algorithm or the which compiler optimization flags to use. You're in a junior role, so it's unreasonable to expect you to display mastery of advanced material. But you should be able to explain what you know and what you don't, and ask intelligent questions about the material.

If it's regarding debugging code, you need to show specifically what goes wrong, where, and how.

A guess about why would be helpful, but isn't necessary. If your colleagues ask you to try something but you don't understand its relevance, do it without complaining. You should ask why it would help, but make it clear you're doing so because you want to learn, not trying to argue with them.

Don't expect handholding.

If they offer a broad solution or a general idea, make an honest effort at implementing it. If you have specific problems, you can always ask again. But if you ask for complete solutions or help with simple syntax, they will quickly tire of assisting you.

Try to match the technical level of the question to the experience and workload of the coworker you ask.

Don't ask the team lead what the syntax for an anonymous function is; one of the mid level developers, who are probably less busy, can answer this easily. Conversely, if you've found an error in critical code that only the lead has write permissions on, then it makes little sense to talk to the mid level devs.

Most importantly, don't be afraid to ask questions.

You don't know everything; nobody does. You're in a junior role; questions are expected. I'd be worried about a junior teammate who never asked questions. How are you going to learn more without asking about it? Putting in reasonable effort is different from assuming you have to do it all on your own. Spending forever trying to independently solve a problem is a waste of time, and therefore, money. Not just your time, but also the time of whoever has to review your work. And fix it, because your solution to a difficult problem will very likely have its own problems.

There are a few key ideas about asking questions that underlie these points:

Other people's time is valuable.

Display desire to contribute and learn.

Asking for help is not a sign of weakness.

Which questions you ask and how you ask them is one of the biggest indicators of your usefulness and ability. In a junior role you'll be judged on how you learn a lot more than what you know (assuming your colleagues are reasonable people). Asking insightful questions and showing that you learn from the answers will earn you respect and credibility.

Taken from https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/42384