Don't hide your struggles
Impressions matter and in companies where promotions are based on peer feedback, it may be tempting to hide your struggles during your weekly meetings or daily standups to be perceived as a better, more successful or more senior engineer.
Assuming you work in a normal company (i.e. in a non toxic environment), you shouldn’t hide your struggles for a few reasons:
- Your peers can’t help you if they don’t know you are running into issues. It doesn’t matter how capable and willing to help they are if they never had an opportunity to help
- The issue you have may be something others are running into too. Raising these issues is an opportunity to better understand how widespread they are and their impact – from there appropriate staffing can be allocated to resolve these problems
- You are creating a toxic environment where people won’t feel comfortable talking about their issues at work – if you cannot talk about minor technical problems, you definitely won’t be able to talk about worse problems.
It’s also important to remember that what is difficult to you might be easy for a peer and vice versa. You have different knowledge/strengths than your coworkers and it’s by sharing more broadly your issues/solutions that you can be more successful as a team/engineering organization.
For what it’s worth, I’ve definitely done my share during my career by asking a bunch of dumb and random questions :)