Ask HN: How long do you put off getting help on Stack Overflow/Lists/IRC?

I try to search as much as possible before posting a question. Usually someone else has had the issue I do. I'd rather find their accumulation of knowledge and add my own, rather than start another pile.

It depends on the problem. Of course, I always have a decent shot at it myself first, but if the problem is easy to describe and is most likely just a case of knowing some trick I post it fairly quickly. I see nothing wrong with that - that's what SO is for and it's great at what it does.

If it would take a significant amount of effort to distill the problem to something that can be described on SO then I'd spend a lot more time trying to figure it out first. Not only would it take more time to post, but it's also less likely to get answers and those answers are less likely to be useful.

I use IRC a lot, for both asking and responding other users questions, I also like to read other people questions in mailing lists.

Asking and responding interesting put me in contact with great programmers, tools and problems that otherwise I will not be exposed to.

I specially enjoy the emacs IRC and mailing list, I always learn small tricks that boost my editor knowledge.

In general, any problem you are having has existed before. Any issues you've had during development other programmers have had as well. This is especially true for any popular language/framework/design problem. The programmers that have had these problems before you will often blog about it, open issue tickets somewhere, or be vocal on the mailing lists. Google should be able to answer just about any issue you are having, since it already exists on the web somewhere. If the search results are slim then chances are you are doing it wrong or not thinking about the problem correctly.

Of course you may discover a bug or some edge case. In that case feel free to go out and post about. However, if this is happening once a day, or even once a week, you are most likely doing it wrong.

Just remember - other people have been in this spot before, what did they do to fix it?

An important factor is if I need that to do some paid work and urgently or is it something without a deadline.

Generally, I would know quite soon by a google search if the problem is a common one or something very specific. If I see several different solutions, I may take time to try them before asking. If I see that nothing matches closely, I would not hesitate and ask.

Of course, if I'm doing something just for my own education, I'm more than happy to try by myself for any period of time.

In 1999 I used to ask (on usenet), but it has been at least 5 years since I've encountered a problem for which there was no solution on the net. If you know how to search, almost all problems already have solutions on the net.

I do this too.

In my opinion whether you're wasting time comes down to how you're solving the problem. You shouldn't be doing the same thing over and over again. If possible you should be learning something new about your application or the libraries you are using. You should be taking notes because you will probably run into this problem again.