It can be pretty painful to see people systematically dismiss anything you say, or always seek out a second opinion, for no other reason that they have a hard time believing anything reliable can come out of your mouth.
I won't let that happen again.
You're new to something? Ask for pointers if you can't find something relatively quickly yourself. That's `smart`. You're new, the documentation might be inaccurate, out of date or not in the place you'd expect it unless you've already been at the company and learned their structure etc.
You're stuck on something and can't figure it out? Ask for some help to double check your own logic. Run them through all of the things you've already tried. This shows that you're not incompetent but have in fact already tried all those obvious things they'd ask you about. Also do actually run them through those steps, don't just talk about you having done them already. Sometimes you've overlooked something the first 2 times and showing it to someone else makes you notice (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging if you'd like to first use a non-human just in case). You wouldn't believe the amount of times where I've been the helper and all I had to do to help was to ask them to run me through what they had already tried and the above happened. They showed me something as "and see I tried this and then it doesn't ... oooh" ;)
Do not ask for help on the exact same thing 5 times in a row. That definitely makes me think you're `incompetent`. Happens way too often too unfortunately.
Learned that the hard way. I am not going to ask beginner questions in new social group. Way better is to Google them in the evening. People will treat you better as a result I swear.
Also I agree that not all companies reward this. Not all people do either and it's unfortunately necessary to 'hide your smarts' so to speak. That doesn't change my overall opinion though. At a good company / in a good team, you're going to be able to do that smart thing. And yes I see this all the time when onboarding new people. They're not used to it and 'hide' things. Ultimately it takes most of them way longer than it should to onboard and I might form a less than great opinion of them. On the contrary there was a team lead recently that asked lots and lots of "dumb questions" early on and asked them quickly as they came up. Instead of taking 2 weeks and still not being properly set up for everything, he was up and running without any issues within a day and could start working on stuff.
You yourself said you will judge new one badly of they make bad guess. There is no to little price for not asking. There is serious price for asking.
Your specific experience might be different from mine as well. In most places I have been there were lots of 'standard' things in use that were easily Google-able. You may also mainly work in languages that make it hard to find things you don't already have a mental model of (scripting languages, untyped languages etc.) vs. where I like working: typed languages where I can let the IDE guide me through. Frameworks that make things easily string searchable etc.
There's a price for not asking: To take the example I gave before. If you take 2 weeks to get up to "I can deploy code for development and debug it" that's a bad sign. If you're up an running in a day or two, you're usually golden.
The stuff you claim one should ask about, is stuff that you team should explain to you in the first place. There is literally no reasonable question, just some workaround for "my team does not have Readme, won't tell me they have secret steps for running project and absurdly will blame me if I won't make it fast".
How does the new person distinguish between googlable question and company specific
Do tell me, what stuff did I say one should ask about, that the team should explain in the first place? Why would these questions not be reasonable?
What I can tell you is that we have a `README.md` in every service. We have our onboarding docs directly in the source as well as markdown files. Every new developer's first PR is to improve the onboarding documentation. Regardless of that, most developers do find something to actually improve, even if it's just adding a cross-referencing link between docs or moving stuff around, so that it's documented in the right place in the onboarding flow. Of course, if your documentation is perfect for every situation and every type of person I commend you. In my experience, there's always one thing or another that someone doesn't understand or where a step is missing. Not because it's secret, but for example because everyone (so far) thought it was obvious. Take the example of a command you're supposed to run but replace one or more of the parameters with your own values.
So let's actually make an example of something where people should ask because it's not Googlable. Take an imaginary part of some setup documentation like for example
Replace the parameter with your own baseUrl you chose in step 1 and run `someScript.sh https://example.com/yourBaseUrl` to create the basic setup.
One improvement the next dev might make is to change it to
Replace the parameter with your own baseUrl you chose in step 1 and run `someScript.sh <yourBaseUrl>` to create the basic setup.
There's that tip that says that you should do your own research before asking a question and then ask the question in a way that shows you did this. That should improve the outcome in many situations.
In addition, there's what a previous commenter said about knowing that others also have their own things they're dealing with, and I kinda don't wanna be the guy who adds to that any if I can avoid it (just in case they're not that other type of person I mention here).
"This code will never be used."
"Oh, ok." proceeds to write garbage to test out various features and different ways of doing the same thing
"Hey, this code is garbage and lacks consistency. Lets show it to everyone to warn them about this guy. We won't mention it until letting him struggle a couple years, but make sure he doesn't get any interesting work."