> since 100% of people already agree that you should never be afraid to ask basic but obviously important questions.

You don’t have a great mental model of how most people think

I don't think that's true. A lot of people are afraid to ask basic questions that everyone would think are important because they'd feel stupid asking them.

The thing is that in many a case those basic questions have not all actually been asked and answered because everyone involved thought the same: it's stupidly simple, I better not ask for fear of being marked dumb.

I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.

But then it often turns out that one of those stupid questions has not been answered sufficiently or people were thinking of completely different answers to the question. So it was a good thing that someone brought it up.

And if the question did already get taken into account and people did have the same answer(s) in mind then if a senior person asked, it will probably just be taken as "this guy knows his stuff and is just dotting Is and crossing Ts" VS a junior "asking dumb questions that everyone should know the answer to, duh!"

I’ve had multiple times in my career when people got mad at me for asking basic but obviously important questions. Things like:

* What invariants does this complex transformation preserve? What guarantees does it make about the output? (Come on, we all have a general idea, SpicyLemonZest should read the code if he wants all the details.)

* What’s the latency impact of adding this step? (It can’t be big enough to matter, stop trying to block my project!)

* Why did the last release advance to production when it wasn’t passing tests? (How dare you, our team works so hard, it says right here in our release manual that those test failures count as passing.)