We’ve all done it. You hit an error, take one look at the message, and fire it off to someone else. Maybe you drop a screenshot in Teams with a quick “anyone seen this before?” hoping they’ll swoop in with an answer.
That’s what I call outsourcing your problem.
Asking for help is fine, in fact it’s part of working in tech, but how you ask matters. When you just forward the problem, you’re asking someone else to start cold. They don’t know what you’re doing, what changed, or what you’ve already checked. They have to do all the discovery you skipped.
If you want real help, bring context. Read the message. Try to understand what it’s saying. Even if you don’t get far, showing effort changes everything. Compare these two approaches:
“Anyone know how to fix this?” vs. “I ran X and got this error. It looks like Y is failing, but I’m not sure why. Can you help me read it?”
The second one tells people you’ve tried to think. It gives them a place to start. They’ll respond faster, and you’ll actually learn something instead of just copying a fix.
Good troubleshooting starts with ownership. Most people don’t expect you to know everything, but they do expect you to care enough to figure out what’s happening before asking for a rescue.
So before you hit send on that screenshot, take a breath. Read the error. Think about what changed. Try to narrow it down.
Then, if you’re still stuck, ask for help with context.
I say this as someone who’s been that person. I’ve fired off plenty of screenshots hoping someone else would save me five minutes of reading. It never helped. The best fixes I’ve ever learned came from slowing down long enough to understand what the system was actually saying. Once I stopped outsourcing my problems, I started getting better at solving them.