Currently have a junior dev on the team that asks way too many questions, most that can be easily googled. How do we push him in the right direction to become more independant.
Your particular handling of him will depend on his personality and relation to the team, but one way I've found to handle this is to sit with him on a few questions and walk him through the most basic levels of your thought process as you think of queries and Google them, select results, etc. This way you're "teaching him to fish" so that he can use that methodology in the future.
While it may often seem simple to "just Google it," it can be difficult for people to come up with appropriate queries and weigh results, especially in new/unknown contexts.
A lot of the time we have ready answers if other people ask us questions because we're actively ready to attack and criticize to get an answer, but we're more reluctant to do that with ourselves. So if the teaching approach doesn't work, then another way is to ask him to list up the questions he has, give it 10-15 minutes, then review them himself to see how he would answer them -- the idea is to give him some time to "reset" and get a fresh perspective.
Well, my mentor used to yell "RTFM, doood!". Which I did. And got the answer more than once.
I would like to agree that(as a sibling comment points out) this depends on his personality and relation to the team.
When it was my chance to mentor, I would sit with the junior guy and just talk about the context and problem at hand. Talk about the keywords and then form a query to google. I would sometimes intentionally put in the wrong query and then refine it for better results. It worked.
But juniors are sometimes bad at retaining processes and a similar query would pop up in a few weeks again. Then I would just send them a lmgtfy link (which is a dick move. Don't do this). Have some compassion, patience and empathy. It might take longer but that guy will thank you in the long run.
One approach some people take is asking "how much time did you spend on this?", where if time is less than 15 minutes you can usually reject the question outright.
