> Just because I ask you in person for help from time to time does not equate to me not contributing anything.

That's not what I said. My comment was about working in parallel and demanding immediate coworker input to advance.

> Just because someone asks you for help in person does not mean you can't say 'no, can you try me at this time or send me an email detailing the issue'.

The situation is not asking for help in person, it is interrupting to ask for help.

> Solving problems can be a siloed experience, but depending on the organization or team, most problems in today's businesses are team efforts, and require team collaboration. Having blinders with comments like 'solving your problems is your problem' is a great way to overlook when a problem someone is having is actually YOUR problem because you overlooked a bit of code or configuration or documentation.

I never said anything about working in silos. We still have a daily standup, we still do sprint planning, we still to regular operations reviews. I take ownership for my own actions and deliverables and help coworkers. This is simply a matter of how to request that assistance and the expectations around when that is provided.

I'm not a parrot that will recite word for word what you wrote. Yes you didn't say anything about silos, but signaling to people that their problems are never your problems is a great way to discourage that person sharing any more information with you. The different agile rituals are a great way to get broad understanding on whats happening, but they will never capture the small problems that come up during the time in between.

Asking for help in person is literally interrupting someone, no matter what they are doing because their attention has to be re-directed from whatever they were doing to you. So there is no meaningful difference between asking for help and interrupting to ask for help. But through social cues I can tell what level of concentration you might be on, and with some precision judge when a good time might be to check in. Hell, I will definitely be wrong some of the time, but that's just life.

The situation is obviously different for someone that is always co-dependent on others for getting work done.

I can ask my team’s channel for advice, and someone who is not currently deep in concentration will see it pretty quickly. This often works late at night, which in-person did not.