Yes - I'm a senior member of my team too (to the extent that I've previously been the team lead of similar teams) and it's so freeing to be able to:

1. Give plenty of credit to the juniors when they do good work, even if they were reliant on support, with no need to take credit myself

2. Give up some time working on my own objectives to coach the juniors, even though there's no cost code to book the time to and nobody asks me to do it

3. Easily say, with zero guilt: "no sorry that can't be done in 2 weeks, that's a 6 week job" or "sure I can do my part of this job but I'm going to need you to commit XYZ other resources if you want it to be a success"

4. Interpret the rules in the way I think is best for the organisation, not trying to please the person with the most pedantic interpretation

5. I can produce convincing explanations of how my work performance is delivering value to the organisation (whereas juniors can sometimes work their arse off and get no recognition for it)

I'm also a middle aged white man which seems to confer a lot of unearned trust, but combined with my professional experience I seriously think I have it easier than the juniors in so many ways, and it's my responsibility to give back a bit.

Never be afraid to ask stupid questions. As someone who spent years doing penetration testing, I can assure you that when stupid questions don’t have an obvious answer, someone isn’t thinking properly.

Also never be afraid to question people who answer quickly. We spend way too much effort training smart people to answer quickly rather than deeply, and there’s almost always a tradeoff between the two.

In my experience this usually doesn’t turn into a career hit, but a career boon. I’ve been doing this since I was a junior, now I’m a staff engineer, and admittedly I am biased toward myself, but my career growth has been robust and among both my current t team and my professional network I feel I command a fair amount of respect and approachability because of this practice, which always pays off in the long run

I would go even further and call it the responsibility of high status to ask such questions.

As a high status person, you have an outsized influence on culture whether you like it or not, and an environment in which this kind of question can be asked ultimately leads to better outcomes.

I used to be the one that in big meetings would ask the 'dumb' questions a lot of people undoubtedly had in their mind, but wouldn't dare to pose. I didn't care that some people would find the question stupid, since it would make other people happy for not having to speak up themselves while still getting the info they needed. It would as well make some people happy for establishing a slightly higher place in the pecking order. At least i would gain some karma and maybe even some admiration.

Over the years I did this less and nowadays I mostly only speak when asked so in rather big meetings.

How did this come to be? I found that people who feel that they belong in the higher ranks of the social pecking order sometimes don't like this behavior and actively try to make you look bad. As I'm quite sensitive and am generally a people pleaser who thrives on getting external validation (I'm working on it...), it did not feel good and I feel it wasn't worth the trouble...

Absolutely. As I get more and more senior, I found myself prefacing a lot of questions with "let me ask some stupid questions" to ask some broad questions or context of the meeting. It can be something seemingly obvious, what's important is it somehow breaks the barrier for others to ask questions. I used to say "I'm going to play my 'new guy' card one more time" when I'm new at a company, but this seems to work more generically, and tends to work in the team's benefit.

Yes this is probably the best thing about feeling senior enough and maybe the best measure of seniority. If you dare ask stupid questions you aren't stupid.

But then there are likely also situations when you feel that you ask a bunch of stupid questions but are faced with blank stares because people doesn't understand the context enough for those questions either or they are struggling enough with other problems to even entertain that kind of question.

It can kind of lead to a similar situation to when the math professor at uni jokingly asks a "trivial" math question in front of his students. It's trivial only once you have worked that kind of problem a 1000 times.

Indeed. As a senior, I found out that at the last 'retrospective' I was one the only ones who had anything on 'needs improvement' 'saying what I believe others might be thinking' - and during anonymous voting my items did get most of the votes.

I wish more people were like you. I can't speak to the past but it seems all anyone in high status positions wants to do is be "guilded" and left alone.

Good!

https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-fold

Sufficient status entirely changes how the act of asking dumb questions is perceived by others. A person with a small title is seen as asking dumb questions because they are dumb. A person with a big title asks dumb questions because they are smart. Of course it's not just title but also age, gender, race, appearance, etc.

I have an account on reddit that leans into extremes, specifically to collect the ad hominem attacks, while wading into benign topics people won’t talk about but would like consensus on

because they are afraid the benign topic will cause them to get ad hominem attacked or generally vilified

most people’s reddit profiles are their whole identity and they try to stay in moderate “polite company” at the expense of remaining ignorant

I have understood that the vast majority of people are simply not interested in having conversations, their goal is to perform social dance that scores them social points.