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In this week’s Career Alert, we start with an announcement: Over the past year, our partner Rahul Pandey has shared his insights and advice for how to advance your career. Now, Rahul is passing the torch to a new expert, and this will be his final issue. But don’t worry—we’ll continue bringing the most important news and recommendations straight to your inbox.
In the last issue, we highlighted a few of the most popular pieces of advice from 2025. To see all previous issues, check out our Career Alert archive.
The #1 rule about asking questions
As engineers, continuous learning is a fundamental part of the job. A huge part of learning comes from trying something, getting stuck, and then asking a question to your teammates.
Here’s what is often overlooked in that process: The quality of your question determines the quality of the answer. So it’s worth thinking about how you can level up your question-asking skills.
The guiding principle when it comes to asking a question is simple: Make it easy for others to help you. Let’s break down what that means.
Include the necessary information. In the software engineering world, for instance, asking something like “Can you explain why the app is crashing?” puts an enormous burden on the question recipient to collect more info before they can help you. They’ll need to know:
What action caused the app to crash?
Does the issue reproduce?
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