When asking questions in Slack (or Teams or Discord or IRC) you should provide a lot of context in the initial question. This helps those on the other side of the question understand what you are trying to achieve and prevents them from spending time guessing at your intentions.
Better Questions
Consider the following interruption:
<Asker> I have a question.
If you are on the other end of that message, what do you do? Inevitably you have to ask for clarification and the asker should know that. It is much better to just ask your question:
<Asker> Do you have any examples of database migrations?
In many cases, there are subtleties that you can reasonably anticipate the recipient will need to clarify to help you. When there may be ambiguity you can help your reader by providing even more context:
<Asker> Question: do you have any examples of database migrations? I need to add an index across multiple columns in the
usertable and add some columns to thelogintable for the new security feature.
How to Ask When You Have Authority
The example above is relatively technical, but the same pattern holds for many interactions. Some people have mentioned getting very nervous when they get a message from their boss:
<Boss> Got a minute?
What are you supposed to do in that case? People have confessed to me that they always assume they are going to lose their job when their boss asks them if they have a minute!
my favorite part about having a job is assuming you’re fired every time your boss calls you into their office
— Laurazepam (@andlikelaura) February 5, 2020
You can reduce the stress on your team by providing more context:
<Boss> Got a minute? I want to run our projections for the Pheonix project by you before we talk to finance.
If you are in a position where others are likely to interrupt themselves for you, and the need is not urgent, you can give them the gift of more focused time by letting them know when their response is needed:
<Boss> I want to run our projections for the Pheonix project by you before we talk to finance on Friday, do you have time before 2 pm on Thursday?
When you’re asking questions, provide more context than you think is necessary. It will cut down the back and forth and help everyone get to the answer more quickly.