The steps to asking thoughtful questions at your software engineer internship
1️⃣ Take some time to think about the question.
What is the issue you're having? Have you encountered similar ones in the past, and if so, how are they similar? Start thinking about what they have in common, and from there, try to understand what you don't already know.
2️⃣ Spend some time trying to solve the problem.
Documentation, digging through the codebase, Stack Overflow, Slack channels, you name it.
Those are just a handful of resources you have at your disposal.
If you're dealing with a bug in your code, well, you know debugging is your best friend if not using print statements.
3️⃣ Be strategic about asking your question.
At this point, you've pretty spent a good 45 minutes if not an hour or two trying to solve the problem, but you still haven't achieved your desired result.
You don't know if you're going down a rabbit hole, overthinking the problem, having a slight misunderstanding of the problem, etc.
So, it may be wise at this stage to start asking questions.
BUT
Before you ask for help, make sure you can answer the following questions:
✅ What is your problem, and why is it important to solve?
✅ What steps have you currently taken, and what have currently learned from the process of solving that issue?
Ideally, you want to make the questions as narrow as possible so that it's easy for people to understand your question and help you.
Welcome to the team! Excited to see the innovative ideas and fresh energy you'll bring.