You post a question in the team channel at eleven in the morning. By four it has one emoji on it and no replies. The conclusion you reach is that nobody wants to help you, and that is almost never what happened. What happened is that your question, as written, could not be answered by anybody reading it quickly.
Most unanswered questions are unanswerable, and the whole fix is in the asking.
Say what you are trying to achieve, not only what broke. Somebody who knows the goal can tell you the entire approach is wrong, which is frequently the answer you needed. Somebody who has only your stack trace can help you only if they happen to have seen that exact trace before.
Put the specifics in. The version. The exact error text, copied rather than paraphrased. The command you ran. What you expected instead. A question that takes three follow-up questions to understand costs a reader ten minutes, and ten minutes is more than most people have spare in the middle of a morning.
Say what you already tried. That saves the four people who would have suggested the obvious thing, and it quietly signals that you are not asking the room to do your thinking for you.
Do not ask to ask. A lone message reading does anyone know anything about the payment service buys you nothing and waits for permission that nobody feels qualified to give. Ask the real question in the first message.
Ask in public rather than in somebody's direct messages. A direct message lands on one person who may be in a workshop or on holiday, and the answer helps exactly one human being once. In the channel it reaches whoever happens to be free, and it is still there in six months for the next person who searches for that error.
Then close it out. When you solve it yourself, reply under your own message saying what it turned out to be. Hardly anyone does this, and threads that end in an answer are among the most useful documents a team owns.
And if it is genuinely urgent, say so and say why, with a time attached. I am blocked on this afternoon's release. Urgency is information, and people act on it right up until the moment everything you post is urgent.
– Asael Shinder
