Question about asking for help when you're stuck on a problem

I was trying to fix a weird bug in a spreadsheet for my school's budget last Tuesday, and I spent over two hours going in circles. I was at my desk, totally stuck, when my coworker Lisa walked by and asked what was wrong. I almost said 'nothing' but instead I showed her the formula, and she spotted a missing parenthesis in about ten seconds. I always thought asking made me look bad, but it saved me a whole afternoon of frustration. Has anyone else had a simple question solve a big headache for them?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_drew19d ago

Two hours for a missing parenthesis is brutal.

parkermorgan19d ago

Tell me about it. That's the kind of bug that makes you want to flip a table. You stare at the code forever, and it's always the smallest, dumbest thing. The worst part is the shame when you finally find it.

michaeljones19d ago

My old team had a bug that took three days to track down. It was a single letter typo in a config file, a lowercase L that should have been a one. The whole system would crash at random and we were checking everything but the config.

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