A few days ago a team member asked me a question which I didn’t have the answer to.
It somehow educated me, boosted my confidence, and taught me a great lesson about focus and pace.
It was my teammate’s first on-call week. On our team, we have a weekly on-call rotation where we are the support team’s go-to person for the more involved problems.
Most times, inquiries that come from our (great BTW) support team, are non-trivial and require in-depth knowledge of the system. It is not straightforward for new team members to have the answers, so it is common to ask a more experienced friend for help.
So it happened that the new team member came to me for help. Unfortunately, I (1 year at the company) didn’t have the answer either.
I think that if I was the on-call developer this week, I would have reached out for help from another team member. However, I decided to give it a go and suggested we try to solve the issue together.
We hopped on a video call and started backtracing the problem: navigating through the codebase, reading some functions line by line, and untangling the unknown (to us) path.
It didn’t take us long to find the problem and even have a solution in mind.
I am not sure I would have been able to do it if I hadn’t been asked for help!
But how come? Why was helping someone else easier than facing the issue myself?
I think it has everything to do with pace and focus.
For me, coding can sometimes be erratic. It can be a fast-paced activity of thinking, keystroking, jumping between tabs, and debugging.
This speed alone can put me in stress. Not in the negative aspect of the word, but more like that sport is stressful. It puts the body and mind in a state of fast reaction and narrow focus. It can be great for certain tasks, but also be disruptive for others.
Talking about the issue forced me to slow down, and by that calm down, get out of the stress state, and see the big picture more calmly.
Furthermore, wearing the “helper” hat, led me to explain how to approach the problem investigation instead of jumping to the act of investing. The focus changed from solving the problem to thinking about the process.
When facing an unknown issue we might now know the answer, but we do have tools, mental models, and experience that can help us pave the way for a solution.
The combination of slowing down, zooming out, and focusing on the process helped us in multiple ways:
- The debugging process was calm and purposeful
- The newer teammate was part of the process and was able to learn from it
- I boosted my confidence in facing problems in areas of the system that I am less familiar with
For me, it was a great experience, and I hope that it was a good one for my teammates as well.
How do you feel about facing such problems? What do you find helpful? Let me know :)