alt Hacker NewsI’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.)
These are good counterexamples to my "100% of people" claim as they illustrate something I hadn't taken into account in my answer: That a basic but obviously important question could have negative implications about other people. I agree that it's certainly not always the case that those people are OK with such questions.
When I wrote my comment, I didn't have such questions in mind. I wish I'd written it to exclude such questions, because I think they're not central to the issue here, which is whether or not asking questions that have negative implications about one's own ability is always a good idea.