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Comment by rsanek | Hacker News Reader

"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.

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Yep, I fully agree with this view and I find that it's seniors who ask the 'dumb' questions. Everyone is worried about losing face in this precarious economy... But seniors are able to ask really smart questions as well so even their dumb questions sound smart... They can usually spin dumb questions into a smart questions by going one level deeper and bringing nuance into the discussion. This may be difficult to do for a junior.

My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face and tend to talk a big game. As a team lead, I try to use language which expresses any doubts or knowledge gaps I have so that others in my team feel comfortable doing it as well. But a key aspect is that you have to really know your stuff in certain areas because you need to inspire others to mirror you... They won't try to mirror you if they don't respect you, based on your technical ability.

You need to demonstrate deep knowledge in some areas and need to demonstrate excellent reasoning abilities before you can safely ask dumb questions IMO. I try to find the specific strengths and weaknesses of my team members. I give constructive criticism for weaknesses but always try to identify and acknowledge each person's unique superpower; what makes them really stand out within the team. If people feel secure in their 'superpower', then they can be vulnerable in other areas and still feel confident. It's important to correctly identify the 'superpower' though because you don't want a Junior honing a skill that they don't naturally possess or you don't want them to be calling shots when they should be asking for help.

    My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face

So much this! Both from my experience as Junior very many years ago and also with Juniors (and not so Juniors) today.

    tend to talk a big game

Very big game. Claude does too. The kind of BS it spews in very confident language is amazing.

    As a team lead, I try to use language which expresses any doubts or knowledge gaps I have so that others in my team feel comfortable doing it as well

Agree. I also often literally say "Dumb idea: X" to try and suss out areas that may have been left by the wayside and under-explored or where assumptions have been made without verifying them. It's amazing how often even "Seniors"+ will spew assumptions as fact without verification. It's very annoying actually.

    superpower

How do you actually do this tho? I would love to do this but it seems hard to find an actual "superpower". Like where does "super" power start vs. "yeah they're better at this than others but definitely not as good as me or "person X that definitely does have that superpower". Like when can you start encouraging so to speak,

The fact that you mentioned Claude (LLMs) is interesting! I definitely feel like there is a parallel; maybe because AI sometimes hallucinates, people have built up a tolerance for this kind of speculative use of language from people as well.

About finding the superpower of each team member; after working with someone for a few months, I start to notice certain patterns in how they think. Sometimes there might be something they say once or a question they ask which makes me view them more favorably than before. Maybe they're fast, good at assembling stuff or slow but good at building stable core components. Maybe they're similar to me or maybe they have a skill I don't have or a certain interest/focus or way to approach problems that is different from me but is beneficial to the project and/or team.

It's a bit like playing a weird game of chess where you can't see the pieces properly at the beginning so everyone looks like a pawn initially; But then over time you discover that one person is a knight, another is a bishop, another is a queen... And you adapt your strategy as your visibility improves.

Completely agree with this. I got to work closely with an IBM fellow one summer and I was impressed by his willingness to ask "dumb questions" in meetings. Sometimes he was just out of the loop but more often he was just questioning some of the assumptions that others in the room had left unquestioned.

Unfortunately, I found that the culture of "think." at IBM is not matched at many other organizations. Most days, I miss it.

But forced RTO and only 10 days off per year is enough to keep me away ;)

100% agree and more credit if I could give it!

Even as a lead I ask the dumb question when no one else does just because when i can see the look in people faces or realize no one is chiming in the dumb question is needed to ensure everyone drives the point home. I've never been met with any sort of looking down upon nor do i discourage any of my staff - quite the opposite - I champion them for being willing to speak up.

in fairness, these do not sound like "dumb" questions.

Some questions really are dumb and bring no value to the table.

The key is knowing which is which, and that is the part that comes with experience.

> Some questions really are dumb and bring no value to the table.

They do tell you that the person asking them either isn't getting it, which is valuable information, or that they are trying to ask questions for the sake of it, which is also valuable information.

Which is exactly what the OP was saying - these are the kind of questions that are often needed, but that seniors won't ask because it'll make them lose face. Juniors are the ones allowed to "not get it".

It depends on the company and the people around you. At one company, my quarterly feedback was that I don’t ask too many questions in meetings, which was mostly due to the fact that the project was pretty straightforward and requirements were hammered down on a document. In another company, asking questions got me the feedback that I was maybe not experienced enough to manage the project by myself, which I was completely capable of. It’s a double edged sword.

But yes on a personal level, being senior enough in my career, I’d rather be thought of as less skilled by asking questions before the s hits the fan, than execute and mismanage a project that I didn’t ask enough questions on. The latter has more consequences tbh.

> my quarterly feedback was that I don’t ask too many questions

Sounds like your manager felt that he need to provide at least some feedback and it is best/safest he could come up with.

Company culture. Some companies I worked for would fire you for questioning decisions. Others, welcomed criticism. You don’t really know which environment you’re in until someone says something. Are you going to take the risk and be the first?

Yes, because i would rather not work at such company and go somewhere else.

In this market you might not have a choice but to stick it out a while

> Are you going to take the risk and be the first?

Absolutely. If the company I work for happens to be one that's so crappy that I'd get fired for questioning things, it's better to find that out as soon as possible. That's not a company that's worth my time and attention.

Think of highly competitive environments where looking foolish can be weaponised against you. They definitely exist here (my experience in UK and Australia)

some of the descriptions above of thoughtful supportive work places where people are free to explore different ideas and question assumptions sound like paradise.

Or judged via rose coloured spectacles.

My entire career - New Zealand, and Australia - asking questions is weaponised (as I stated above)

Graduate, Junior, Senior, Team Lead, - my title hasn't mattered to the response

You're working in toxic workplaces. Most of them aren't like this.

(I believe you when you say that most of yours are like this.)

Unionize

I bet most workplaces are toxic in exactly this way.

IBM Aus discouraged it, Accenture, Concentrix, EY, CommBank, ANZ, and others all encouraged it, for myself.

I wouldn't say discouraging it will be the norm across most places in Australia.

Somewhat, but not exactly the reverse, is Tall poppy syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

I had read it about AU and JP and had read about the Jante thing, but the article says it is there in some other countries too. Probably exists everywhere in some form.

I wonder if people here have experienced anything like that. My guess is yes.

That, I have certainly seen.

But that is about attacking success stories, not about attacking you for not knowing something. I know you said reverse, just spelling out they're different.

Win an award? Get a callout for effort? Rest of the office will probably dunk on you. Varying in scale from a day or two of jokes to career ruining.

But... Ask the meaning of an acronym in a meeting, or say you don't know how to do something, and you'll probably just be given a name to ask.

>I know you said reverse, just spelling out they're different.

Hey. Sup. :)

I didn't say reverse.

I said:

>Somewhat, but not exactly the reverse, is Tall poppy syndrome.

Next time, and forever after, check points better before commenting, including the point that is right above the comment that you replied to, aka mine.

Pinky promise? :)

Welcome to the AI (r)age, where people comment without thinking or reading.

Oops, mea culpa.

Entschulding!

It was happening much before that, and not only on HN.

In fact, it has been happening forever, and anyone who doesn't know it is a rotten egg.

Well, this is some fun irony. An attacking comment, for offering an explanation, and acknowledging the prevalence of that particular cultural item.

You just attacked an explanation, including personal slag like "anyone who doesn't know".

I did it because you misquoted me about my use of the word "reverse" in a sentence, as I clearly pointed out above. So it was like making someone (me) look like they said something they didn't say.

But maybe I went at it too strong.

>Entschulding

Typo, entschuldigung.

There are kinds of questions that you can ask to signal your seniority and matureness. There are other kinds of questions that, should you ask them, will leave people wondering what the hell have you been doing for the past N years and why they're paying you senior-level salary.

A lot of early signs of problems, such as critical information becoming tribal knowledge instead of being documented, are revealed when asking the second kind of questions.

I am bit more senior nowadays.

Whenever I don’t understand something I say something like: "Uh, I’m probably the only one here, but I don’t get it…"

I'm the CTO and probably one of the most common things I'll say is "help me understand X"

My favorite CTO/CIO acronym is "PFM". Such as, "and then we run through the PFM process, and it comes out and does..."

PFM - Pure Fucking Magic

I've only once ever had anyone actually ask what it means... essentially it's used as an abstraction for a complex process that would be excessive to explain in context.

I asked, after the meeting.

There’s power dynamics that come into play when you’re a C level executive. You’re allowed to ask questions. For entry level employees, asking questions almost always comes with a judgement of lower skills/experience. This is often what senior and experienced folk forget, there’s a certain amount of assumed competence when you asked questions, that doesn’t get assigned to newer people.

My cousin, when he got his first job, he managed to wipe the database clean on his first day at work. (classic, I know)

The seniors were very understanding, and more importantly it raised important questions about backups, dev vs prod pipelines, etc.

But you can bet my cousin was super embarrassed by it, and saving face was a big part of it.

I totally did this! Why would I need a database named “mysql” inside my MySQL database? Delete that, good job on day one!

Seniors should be the ones embarrassed for giving anyone, let alone a new junior, such level of access

Yup, my SR Director boss often says "I'm an idiot. Can you tell me what 'X' means when most of us probably wanted to know but were too afraid to ask

There are a lot of bad places to work, and those are the types of places that do things like replace junior devs with AI.

The place I work at is in the middle of a new CEO’s process of breaking the company. The company can’t go out of business, but we’ll set stuff on fire for another 12-18 months.

That's been my experience as someone who tends to ask them regularly. I don't have a lot of hubris when it comes down to it, so I'll almost always ask. Especially acronyms or industry/insider business terms... I'll usually do a quick search in a browser, but if the results don't make sense, will simply ask.

Asking stupid questions almost goes hands in glove with "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission." A lot of times, you're better off just doing something. Asking a simple question or making something happen saves a lot of grief more often than not. Understanding is important.

I don't think that's the same. I spitball crazy ideas, but my core knowledge/expertise is sound, and I try not to talk out of my ass. (Or I am upfront when I'm outside my area of expertise. I think it's important to call that out once your word starts carrying some weight.)

A product manager can definitely say things that would make me lose a bit of respect for a fellow senior engineer.

I can also see how juniors have more leeway to weigh in on things they absolutely don't understand. Crazy ideas and constructive criticism is welcome from all corners, but at some level I also start expecting some more basic competence.

In general there are so many different sub-fields of knowledge that it's extremely confining to stay in one area of expertise; the slow uneducated person that has been working to keep some giant build farm running and migrating projects and helping fix tickets for 5 years will have a lot of expertise you don't have if you have a more casual experience of the system.

Company culture != national culture != personal culture. Such things can be all over the place.

I've worked with people from Korea who took me 100% seriously when I said the architecture was too complex and hard to work with slowing down velocity, and although they did end up keeping it there was no outward indication of lost face and they did put in the effort to justify their thinking.

I've also worked with some British, Greek, and Russian people who were completely unwilling to listen to any feedback from coworkers, only order them around.

Even within a person: I know a self-identified communist, who is very open minded about anything except politics.

My Entire career

"Why the f*ck are you asking, you should know this"

"Why the f*ck can you not look that up"

edit: There's an entire chapter of the internet with "LMGTFY" responses because people ask questions.

"Isn't it f*cking obvious"

"Do I have to f*cking spell it out for you"

There's a strong chance that I am autistic, which means, yes, I need people to be (more) explicit.

AI has done a hell of a good job making it easier for me to search for subtexts that I typically miss. And I receive less of the negative feedback when I have something to ask that does help.

Asking questions is a good thing but that doesnt mean ALL questions. It doesnt include questions you could answer with a google search or by reading documentation, obviously.

Got it - ask questions, but not ones that you already know where the answer is.

edit: well, except when you search the documentation and get (literally) 70+ results because you don't know the exact phrasing used in the self hosted wiki...

Or, when it's a question that is domain specific (meaning that the SME is supposed to know it, which you only know if you are... an SME...)

etc

Provide context when asking.

: “hey bob, I looked here and here and here and didn’t find the correct information. Can you show me where to look or tell me the answer so I can document it”

Because most people don’t bother doing the tiniest amount of their own research before asking dumb questions it becomes a huge headache to answer the same thing a million times.

However, if you can show that you did put in the effort to look up the answer first people will be much more willing to help.

So far I have two examples (in this thread) of people making (potentially toxic) judgements about the fact that someone asked a question

Can you show why you assumed that what you are asking for wasn't provided?

Can you also explain why your response is to make rather harsh judgements rather than work out what was going on in the first place?

You can tell that this is a toxic environment because I am getting voted down, by toxic individuals, for pointing out that people in this thread have made the massive misjudgement of claiming that the blame for the issue lies in one person - despite having ZERO knowledge of the actual context of the responses received (and spoken about in the gp), or questions being asked.

Which pretty much sums it up doesn't it.

> Got it - ask questions, but not ones that you already know where the answer is.

More of, ask do the quick google search or check the doc before asking that question. If the quick search or look into the doc does not contain the answer, ask.

I agree - there is a baseline amount of effort that should be expected. I was once dealing with a co-worker who was treating me like an llm. I had to encourage him that our job isn't about knowing things, but figuring things out. There's also that slack DM's don't scale like documentation does.

A completely flipped perspective:

> "Why the f*ck are you asking, you should know this"

Because you mentioned NZ: my father, a toolmaker, said there was a huge difference between Europe and NZ. In Germany/Netherlands, he'd be working under a more senior toolmaker. When he took a job in NZ and asked the boss something, as would have been the proper thing to do in Europe, he got a response just like that: because he was the expert, and his NZ boss was just a manager.

I am sorry that has been your experience. I have worked in a lot of "rough/gruff/hardcore" environments, almost all of my career, at companies that are widely recognized to be fairly political and antagonistic, and none of them have ever, ever been even remotely like this.

I found this varies.

Meta? Ask questions anytime.

Amazon? Not so much.

There’s also the benefit of being naive - like, juniors can be seriously audacious when they haven’t been burned a million times. I miss having excitement and optimism.

This is huge and quite underrated I think. There are some angles that are really hard to see through a weathered lens.

the flip side of this is having juniors create some wildly unrealistic expectations in other business units if we're not careful ;)

The Facebook "little red book" had a quote in it along these lines:

When you don't realize what you can't do, you can do some pretty cool stuff

Culture varies.

It doesn't matter if the culture encourages it, you still don't want to ask dumb questions.

Best VP I’ve ever had would stop meetings with regular frequency and say, “maybe I’m the dumbest person here, but I don’t understand [insert something being discussed], can you help me get a better understanding?”

It was anybody’s guess if they really didn’t understand the topic or if they were reading the room, but it was always appreciated.

I don’t know..this seems like one of those that is admired in HN but I don’t see in any of the multiple US companies that I’ve worked in. People are definitely concerned with looking dumb. “Losing face” may be something people here attribute to Oriental Cultures, but in practice it works similarly here too.

I have worked at a place where people were routinely criticized for asking basic questions on a big all-dev DL (which was archived and searchable, so they actually added to a growing record). The preferred solution was to ask a co-worker on the same team. People were answered a lot of questions were also criticized for being helpful. In neither case was the criticism that much from devs but from managers and given in boss feedback directly to people. Also it had a problem with spreading a good culture and common technical vision to new people, for some reason ( /s )

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