I hope this will answer all comments below as well.
Being a productive member of a team is about finding balance between what you're personally trying to get done and helping your teammates accomplish their tasks. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.
Your formulation of local vs global optimization of priorities is exactly the correct way to view this problem. My priorities and my colleague's priorities are approximately the same priorities, assuming we're on the same team or on adjacent teams. We are both shipping the same product and serving the same users at the end of the day.
That's why, like everything else in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle - interrupting someone 10 times a day for trivial stuff you can look up yourself by reading code or documentation is a waste of the other person's time. But wasting four hours running around looking for an answer to a question that your teammate can answer in two minutes is also a waste of time. The end user is not well served by either behavior.
My rule of thumb is 30 minutes. If I can't find an answer in 30 minutes, and I think a teammate knows the answer and can answer immediately, I will ping them or come to their desk.
Obviously you have to read the room. If the teammate you want to bug looks deeply concentrated in what they're doing, they're in the middle of typing, or you ask and they say "sorry I'm in the middle of something, come back in an hour", I'll leave them alone and probably take a break or something. But if they're just back from a coffee break or a meeting, or finished up a discussion with someone else at their desk, there's just no reason to keep banging your head against your desk.
And of course I hold myself to the same standard. Being dismissive to someone who needs your attention is immature. I always assume good intent, and if someone bothers me too often, I just tell them; for some people I will ask they show me what they've already tried. I find this almost always works.
Being a productive member of a team is about finding balance between what you're personally trying to get done and helping your teammates accomplish their tasks. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.
Your formulation of local vs global optimization of priorities is exactly the correct way to view this problem. My priorities and my colleague's priorities are approximately the same priorities, assuming we're on the same team or on adjacent teams. We are both shipping the same product and serving the same users at the end of the day.
That's why, like everything else in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle - interrupting someone 10 times a day for trivial stuff you can look up yourself by reading code or documentation is a waste of the other person's time. But wasting four hours running around looking for an answer to a question that your teammate can answer in two minutes is also a waste of time. The end user is not well served by either behavior.
My rule of thumb is 30 minutes. If I can't find an answer in 30 minutes, and I think a teammate knows the answer and can answer immediately, I will ping them or come to their desk.
Obviously you have to read the room. If the teammate you want to bug looks deeply concentrated in what they're doing, they're in the middle of typing, or you ask and they say "sorry I'm in the middle of something, come back in an hour", I'll leave them alone and probably take a break or something. But if they're just back from a coffee break or a meeting, or finished up a discussion with someone else at their desk, there's just no reason to keep banging your head against your desk.
And of course I hold myself to the same standard. Being dismissive to someone who needs your attention is immature. I always assume good intent, and if someone bothers me too often, I just tell them; for some people I will ask they show me what they've already tried. I find this almost always works.