alt Hacker News> Never be afraid to ask stupid questions.
Unfortunately that's the kind of black-and-white advice that seldom applies in the real world. Would you want to see your surgeon asking stupid questions? The pilot of the flight you're on?
You wouldn't, because part of your psychological comfort depends on your perception that people like this -- people whose decisions really matter -- actually know what they're doing.
ETA: By "stupid questions", I don't mean "basic but obviously important questions". I mean questions that reveal that you don't know something that other people expect you to know, that signal to them (rightly or wrongly) that they may have overestimated you.
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> By "stupid questions", I don't mean "basic but obviously important questions". I mean questions that reveal that you don't know something that other people expect you to know, that signal to them (rightly or wrongly) that they may have overestimated you.
Ok but you didn’t bring up the phrase “stupid questions” so it’s less about how you define it, and more about a best effort interpretation of how it was originally meant.
And this is why it's very important, in the case of a junior engineer, to use your "I'm just starting here" privilege to ask those stupid questions. Or you can be a very senior engineer who has an established reputation, and can get away with asking what sound like "stupid" questions just because people assume you know what you're doing.
We have an expectation that "smart people" should be able to quickly fill in gaps in lightly-explained systems. Sometimes this is good: when you're teaching people a new concept it's great if they can grasp it quickly and approximately. When you're describing the design of a complex system, you absolutely do not want people to make incorrect assumptions about the parts you're skipping over.
The worst example I've seen was learning that the security of an industrial control platform came down to the fact that the management software wasn't installed by default. The designers had assumed that "knowledge of a software library" was a valid access control mechanism. As the cherry on top, another engineer chimed in that the software was actually installed on the system anyway, just in a different location. It took a pile of incredibly "stupid" questions to surface this knowledge.
I absolutely would want someone who's becoming a surgeon or pilot to ask the "stupid questions." This discussion is about growth and change over time as a person.
Stupid questions are far better than stupid mistakes due to not asking those questions.
Surgeons mark where on the body they're operating. This didn't used to be a standard practice.
Asking "Did I mess up my left and right?" or "Is this the right patient?" feels like a stupid question to ask. I'd certainly rather they ask those questions before operating on me! But turns out it's very hard to get them to do that, so we do surgical site marking instead.