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fubarobfusco comments on Boring Advice Repository - Less Wrong
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Not sure if I understand the difference. Doing your own research is another kind of asking (e.g. asking the internet). Do you mean asking a domain expert?
Sometimes people are willing to spend hours privately researching something — in an intellectually unrewarding and tiring state of incomprehension — when by simply asking an appropriate friend, coworker, or forum they could get a clear and explanatory answer that would much better serve their needs. Scholarship is a virtue, but wasting time and energy is not.
In technical workplaces, this is especially a problem when people think they shouldn't ask for help, out of fear of admitting ignorance. Some folks will spend hours struggling with bad, inadequate, incorrect documentation and beating themselves up over it, for the sake of avoiding admitting to their coworker that they're not quite sure what the third argument to that function is supposed to be.
Any suggestions for best forums for questions that don't have obvious places to ask? I've been happy with ask.metafilter.com, but I haven't used it lately.
If your answer fits any of the categories of Stackexchange that's usually a good place for a question.
Reddit has a number of these, e.g. /r/askscience for general science explanations, /r/answers for "everything you ever wanted to know about anything but were afraid to ask." There are other specific Q&A subreddits for history, social science, and estimation of unusual quantities.
This is probably the biggest waste of time in tech. Who knows what isn't identified and properly leveraged. People are punished for saving time by seeking direction of those who know better (they don't know their jobs), and those who know better aren't rewarded for the work they save others.
On the other hand, you also have the problem of people who will ask questions that could be answered in a 1-minute Google search or by reading the documentation, thus breaking the flow of the senior programmer and wasting 30 minutes of their time.
It does go both ways.
My personal policy is to spend 5-10 minutes searching if I'd be interrupting someone's concentration.