> It isn't just that they don't want to "look dumb", but they genuinely don't want to bother a senior engineer. So, paradoxically, the low-effort nature of Slack has actually created barriers to communication in this case.
This doesn't sound new at all. It adequately describes my experience as a junior long ago, back when you had to walk into the senior's private office and interrupt what they were doing.
Yes.. there are definitely online-people, and offline-people, or text-async-comm people vs personal-comm-people: for one the one way of communication is more convenient, for others the other, and for some there is barely a difference.
But this is imo fully orthogonal to Juniors not daring to ask questions, and depends on personality, the environment, the mentors, and maybe also the online- or offline-affinity vs the most prevalent tools, but as far as I observed that is the least impacting it...
This doesn't sound new at all. It adequately describes my experience as a junior long ago, back when you had to walk into the senior's private office and interrupt what they were doing.