If you have any degree of success as a trouble hacker, you’ll soon get the chance to tackle harder and harder problems. Sooner or later, you are going to run into something that you haven’t seen before. You’ll be in an unfamiliar area of code, or you’ll be looking at technology you haven’t yet worked with. And considering the complexity of today’s software systems – it is probably sooner.
So, what do you do when you don’t know what you’re doing? That brings us to the last point of the troublehacker’s triangle: outreach. When you don’t know what you’re doing, it is time to reach out for help.
Outreach can take several forms. You can reach out to your social network and talk through your problem to get some suggestions on how to proceed. Your colleagues at work usually want you to succeed, so they’ll answer questions and give you ideas on what to try next. You can also leverage online problem-solving communities like StackOverflow. The participants in those communities are genuinely interesting in solving technical problems. Maybe you have a Slack channel at work so you can easily ask questions of your colleagues.
I also think of outreach as including your other information resources. Here, Google is your friend. If you can translate your problem symptoms into keywords, then a search may uncover sites that will give you some ideas. You can often find bloggers who write about their experiences with software. If you are working with components provided by third parties, or even open source, a google search will take you to online documentation. While this is often incomplete or disappointing, you still may get some insight into what to do next. When your problem turns out to be a common problem, the solution is probably already out there on the web. This is probably obvious to you, but I can assure you it isn’t obvious to everyone!
Outreach is tricky, because it involves other people. I am personally more inclined to help someone who has spent some time trying to help themselves. If someone asks me a question and I can find the answer after a few minutes on Google, I wonder why they didn’t do that themselves. And this happens surprisingly often.
While people can respect you for your problem-solving skills, they can also respect you for the quality of the questions you ask. A little bit of thoughtful research can help you ask good questions!