At my first engineering job, I was introduced to the idea of social capital in the context of how to ask for help from other engineers and the consequences of spending one’s social capital ineffectively. I don’t love the textbook definitions of social capital but I think the following example is a good illustration.
When you contribute positively to a social group by respecting shared norms, shared values, trust, cooperation, and reciprocity, you cultivate your social capital. When you violate these norms and values, you squander or exhaust that capital. Misusing social capital can lead you to lose trust of the group.
Since moving on from this role, I’ve never heard the topic mentioned explicitly in the same way in a workplace again but I think it’s one of the more important things you can learn as an engineer. The concept of social capital has become central to how I aim to operate as a positive individual contributor within a broader engineering organization (though much of this applies for any group of people).
As an engineer, you consistently encounter unfamiliar things that you need to learn to do your job effectively. If you’re lucky, there may be good documentation or existing examples, but eventually you’ll come across something you can’t quickly figure out or understand.
There are several paths forward in this situation. You could start reading code until you reach a deep understanding of what is happening. Under time constraints, this approach could be too time consuming. You may need to ask someone with more experience for help with your specific issue.
When you ask for help, it’s important to demonstrate you value the time of the person you are asking. My aim is to display I’ve made a good faith effort to solve the issue myself and exhausted the resources I was able to find. It’s likely the person who ends up helping me will have their own responsibilities that my question pulls them away from. I aim to do the following:
- make it easy for them to help me or answer my question
- display my current level of understanding of what I am working on
- avoid wasting their time, by bringing everything I think is relevant to the beginning of the conversation (see No Hello)
This approach helps the responder use language that I understand (since I’ve shown my level of understanding with my question). It also can reveal areas where my understanding is flawed that can be corrected, which is exactly the kind of help I need.
If you’re posting a message in a community channel, you may not even know who that person is when you’re articulating your question. My approach in this situation is to concisely request for help with the following structure:
- a brief introduction of who I am
- what I am trying to accomplish
- what I have attempted so far and what the results have been, including errors
If I have lengthy explanations or examples, I will either try and link out to them or prepare the entire message first then write a short message to start and post a longer follow up message in a thread to avoid taking over the entire conversation of a channel. In addition to valuing the time of the person answering your question, you want to value the time of your peers who may have questions and ongoing conversations of their own. Recognize that you’re not the only person trying to get your job done and do your best not to monopolize conversations.
Examples
The above might be more theoretical than you’re comfortable with. If that’s the case, here are some examples of what I would deem to be good and bad ways to build social capital rather than squander it.
Good
Hi, I’m Dan from the Risk team. My team is working on onboarding to the new Streaming Platform. From the documentation, I understand that I need to create a new Kafka topic for each of my services that currently calls the RPC in
<old service>. Is it possible to create these topics in bulk? I need to create topics for 10 services, but the instructions only seem to support onboarding a single topic at a time. Thanks!
Why?
The person reading this can understand what you are trying to do and what you have tried so far. If there is documentation you missed, they’ll likely happily link it and might even recognize it’s not as discoverable as it might be since you clearly made an effort to find it but couldn’t. I would expect a positive interaction to result from this starting message.
Bad
How can I bulk onboard topics?
Why?
It’s ambiguous what you are talking about, so the person providing help may need to ask follow up questions to figure out what you are trying to accomplish. Follow-ups for clarity are inevitable sometimes but this attempt has made a poor attempt at clarity. You’ve not explained what you’ve tried if anything, so the person responding will need to ask something like “have you checked the docs?”. They could link you to docs directly. They could assume you already know where the docs are and suggest you read them. They could need to go search for the docs themselves to then link to you. Generally, this cursory approach displays disregard for the time of the person you are hoping will help you. I aim to display respect for this individual’s time, energy and effort because I need their help to be successful.
When it goes wrong
At their worst, these types of conversation first require you to establish common understanding through follow-up questions. In a chat-based environment where it can be easy to get pulled away from one conversation into another or a meeting, these lengthier exchanges become increasingly difficult to manage and can often trail off and require reminder pings from both sides to answer the last request. In my experience, the longer a conversation goes on, the more complicated it typically becomes and the less likely all participants are on the same page. Sometimes a long conversation is needed, but if one is, all the better if you establish as much context up front. It makes it more likely you’ll get the useful information you are looking for before the conversation trails off.
Your reputation
I’ve been on both sides of asking and being asked for help. I value it tremendously when someone asks a question with preparation. Unfortunately, those who ask the least prepared questions are often the most memorable and frustrating. As the individual providing help, you come to recognize regulars. With a finite amount of time and energy, you may need to prioritize some asks over others. In these situations, I prioritize people who use their social capital effectively because I appreciate their efforts to value my time and do my best to reciprocate.