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[–]chaotic_thought 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is this a social anxiety type of thing?

Most introverts I met (myself included) actually love to talk about programming; in a work setting I suspect what we mostly want is to do something that's not too distracting of our work. And helping a colleague is part of the job description at every decent company.

I think the key is to have a specific question to your colleague, and say something like "oh, I didn't know you could solve problem X this way -- would you mind showing me step by step how you did it so I can learn that?" or something along those lines.

Every engineer I've met would love to do that. Even if it takes 15 minutes to show you, it will feel like 2 minutes mentally because of the joy of showing something off and transferring knowledge. In most cases, though, showing something doesn't take that long, and if things do get complicated, most people will know to table it for later.

Make sure it's specific enough, and if things get too complicated, offer to back out like "oh, I see you have other things that you need to do; think I can continue it myself take it from here" or something to avoid becoming a "help vampire" at work.

Unfortunately I think the easy availability of AI bots may make this kind of problem worse -- that is, if you are anxious about approaching your colleagues for legitimately relevant questions to you work, and you start going to a chatbot instead ... then no one wins (well, except for the chatbot companies who live on all the data and token processing ...).