I think if we constantly interrupt each other, we should very critically ask ourselves if that's the proper way forward. Often people physically being there is used as a "crutch" or a "band aid" to bad onboarding practices and big knowledge gaps. I am tired of people seeing their team drowning, distracted, noise, responding to the same question 31040041 times and then simply saying: "well, I need to be there in person to help Josh, he just started". While that's a good team spirit, you gotta look beyond that. There are things you can do to make it easy for yourselves and the new starters.

Of course, people are responsible for their own productivity, but there is also such a thing as a team. And the team itself will benefit if people are less disruptive of each other.

My point is that teams should retrospect aggressively on where they spend their time, and if they find that lots of their time is spent on answering questions to onboarders or big knowledge gaps between one another, they should do something about it.

I won't waste space here outlining what can be done, but there ARE things that can be done. Do those things, and then the argument that you:

A) "must" be in the office to do good collaborative work

B) and you "have" to ask 5 min questions all the time

loses any validity and becomes just corporate laziness and bad management.

You are clearly not a team player.

The goal is to make the team succeed, not to be individual rockstars.

Sure, and if you can't keep up then you should reflect on that. Meetings and discussions are great. Constantly nagging your coworkers because you can't figure out how to do your job on your own is not.

> Constantly nagging your coworkers because you can't figure out how to do your job on your own is not.

This is the problem: you've invented this scenario. There is a gaping middle ground between what people are describing and your stereotype of what they "must really mean"?

I think the problem is that too many of us have experienced this scenario, and had it described much in the way that the OP of the thread did.

Too many people are too un-self-aware to recognize that their "just a 5-minute question" is being asked because they have not internalized the knowledge, rather than because it's genuinely something that they haven't had an opportunity to learn—too un-self-aware to recognize that this situation is unnecessarily stressful and it's their fault.

Yeah people do this simply don't recognize that they are annoying other people. From long time ago I have figured that there are two kinds of people in this world. One is more aware to him/herself and one if more aware to the outward world. Group 1 are usually tagging other people for their benefits (or, for the team's benefit as they so see it) while Group 2 do not do that very often.

Of course this has nothing to say with selfishness or else. It's simply that each Group project their own ideas to the outward world -- so people who like to outreach think other people like that too, while people who doesn't think the inverse. But taking a step back as a third party, we would realize that Group 2 is usually more harmed than benefited.

> Too many people are too un-self-aware to recognize that their "just a 5-minute question" is being asked because they have not internalized the knowledge, rather than because it's genuinely something that they haven't had an opportunity to learn—too un-self-aware to recognize that this situation is unnecessarily stressful and it's their fault.

This is just assumptions though. Too many? Compared to what? Narrators are just as unreliable as anyone; some will be unreasonably opposed to any questions. Complaints aren't all 100% trustworthy. And complainants can also be un-self aware in that when they were more junior, or new, then they also asked questions. They just maybe had people answer them who were more happy to invest in them.