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 essential. In fact, it’s fundamental to working in tech, but how you ask matters. When you simply forward the problem, you’re asking someone else to start from scratch. They don’t know your context, what changed, or what you’ve already investigated. They have to repeat all the discovery work you skipped.
If you want effective help, provide context. Read the error message. Try to understand what it’s communicating. Even if you don’t make much progress, demonstrating effort changes the dynamic completely. Compare these 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 approach shows you’ve engaged with the problem. It gives others a starting point. They’ll respond more quickly, and you’ll gain knowledge instead of just copying a solution.
Effective troubleshooting begins with ownership. Most people don’t expect you to have all the answers, but they do expect you to care enough to investigate what’s happening before requesting assistance.
So before you send that screenshot, pause. Read the error. Consider what changed. Attempt to isolate the issue.
Then, if you’re still stuck, ask for help with context.
I speak from experience. I’ve sent countless screenshots hoping someone else would save me five minutes of reading. It never worked. The most valuable solutions I’ve learned came from taking time to understand what the system was actually telling me. Once I stopped outsourcing my problems, I became better at solving them.