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This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of ex

This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk through all the super-obvious stuff to satisfy the one guy who didn't do his homework. So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have. This has happened to me so often now that you would think the sinking feeling I get before I brace myself to look stupid would go away, but it never does.

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
I do this all the time too and have observed the same results! I ask a lot of dumb questions like "what does XYZ stand for?" and "what was the original problem you were trying to solve by taking this course of action?". Even though I always have that same sinking feeling, usually by the 4th or 5th question I have a very clear idea of what's going on.
Thorentis 5y ago
This is essentially the Socratic method. Arriving at a shared understanding through the asking of questions. I employ this technique regularly and it rarely fails me.
kfarr 5y ago
Yes and it feels like the older I get the more I have to be the one that plays this role to ask these basic questions as younger professionals are fearful to look dumb in front of others
- cbtacy 5y ago
  The fear of looking stupid is a profound motivator in many professions. If you want to understand why so many of the stories posted about people using this technique are of more senior folks or people with more authority (bosses, mentors, professors, etc), this is why. Being willing to potentially "look stupid" requires enormous self-confidence.
  - mewpmewp2 5y ago
    And it may very well be that consequences for looking stupid are worse when you are junior. So it could be a natural progression.
singlow 5y ago
I identify with this situation but my feelings about it are a bit different, although not intentionally. This mirrors my general disconnect with the article. In this situation I feel some anxiety or hesitation about asking these questions, but I don't feel it as a fear of appearing stupid. Instead the anxiety seems to come from worrying that I am annoying or offending everyone with questions about things that are obvious. I have no way of knowing which question is going to reveal the problem, so I will need to shotgun questions. I know that some people that I work with get this completely and will cooperate. Others will get defensive or tune out, so I need to find a balance or tone to try to avoid that. It is similar to when I did tech support as a teenager and someone would call with a problem, wanting a tech sent to their house. I would start asking questions about the problem and they would not want to spend 5 minutes going through a few steps to try to solve it over the phone. I never felt that they thought I was stupid, I just felt they were impatient. Maybe they did think I was stupid, but I was so sure that I could find the answer that I never considered that.
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- codazoda 5y ago
  I did support when I was in my late teens and I ALWAYS started at the very bottom, with the questions that seemed obvious, and worked my way up. Most callers thought it was annoying, so I would often prepare them for the silly simple stuff I was about to ask and ask them to humor me. It was especially painful if I was the 3rd person they had talked to. I guess I still work this way although I've fallen out of the habit of warning people and asking them to humor me.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    The "humor me" tier 2 or 3 tech support people are the best. By the time I've called in I've already done the usual stuff, that's why I called, at least they crack me up "what color is the light on the left side" or whatever, not just silence and clacking and background yelling of tier 1 while they "wait for me to power cycle". Turns out I absolutely cannot do tier 3 support, but I can do 1 and 2 for friends and family and I'm the "whiz" or whatever. Tier three, for me, was basically me in a bad mood talking to me in a bad mood, in order to gatekeep the poor dev/DBA/NOC that had to actually fix things. No thx!
mywittyname 5y ago
One of the best people I've ever worked with used this approach. "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, <here's my interpretation of what you just said>." were two phrases she used all the time. I am surprised at how difficult it has been to emulate her technique. Feeling comfortable asking the obvious questions is one half of the battle, but the other, more difficult half, is knowing what obvious questions to ask. Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no. She knew how to ask them in such a way that gets the person talking in greater detail. It's kind of like being a great interviewer, there's a technique to asking questions in a manner which gets someone talking.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Same. “Just making sure I understand this correctly… stop me if I’m wrong” has worked wonders for my ability to contribute to a meeting.
- nimbius 5y ago
  the problem with this approach is that it makes building trust very difficult, as trust is based on a combination of character and competence. inquisitiveness during problem solving is admirable and good, but in the article many of the applications of 'looking stupid' only serve to render the author untrustworthy.
  - pksebben 5y ago
    I know this might come off as adversarial, but might that say more about your metrics for trustworthiness than the party at question? Which bullets from the article would you consider untrustworthy?
- mandeepj 5y ago
  > Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no. I guess you might be asking straight up binary questions like - is it happening due to xyz? Maybe, changing the question format to something like - what do you think could be the cause behind _fill the situation here___? Just my humble opinion.
tomxor 5y ago
> So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have. I've had similar situations, it feels analogous to group based "rubber ducking"... having someone ask the questions perceived to be known or obvious by the existing groups can be extremely beneficial for all kinds of reasons, in the same way that a rubber duck (real or imagined) will get you to re-evaluate all of your assumptions and usually get you to find the assumption that's incorrect or problematic.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. Wait till you see the fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions of established 'science'. It will pale in comparison with anything you have seen before.
sharadov 5y ago
Early in my career, I was conscious of asking these questions, so as to not appear like a fool, I thought I was expected to know the answers. I took a remote job a while back and realized that the only way to be successful in my role was to keep asking questions, learning about systems and the product. I did not care if my questions seemed stupid. I just asked away. And, it helped..immensely!
coralreef 5y ago
> That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. This is debugging 101. You have assumptions about how a system works, but the output isn't matching those assumptions. You walk backwards over your assumptions and test them to see if they are true. Eventually you get to the precise place where your assumption is wildly different than the output, and there is your bug. The more systems (or people) involved, the longer it takes, the more complexity.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Yep, eventually you're asking things like, "does the variable called 'username' contain the username?" Not too long ago I found that 'username', in fact, did not contain the username.
  - coralreef 5y ago
    I once had a co-worker at a small company (2 developers, me and him). In the spirit of doing less work, he proposed to me changing the meaning of "someProperty" to mean something different, without changing the name of that property. Also, it was a boolean; so he wanted true values to actually represent false, and vice versa. I politely pushed back on that one.
Narann 5y ago
Such behavior can be a good thing, but you could fall in your own bias thinking you know the problem better than them, to finally realize the problem outpace your scope and you are just impacted as anyone in the room. It happen for me once, and this was an humility lesson. Now I keep in mind I can feel I understand the problem then realize later I was all wrong too.
- andrewla 5y ago
  For sure! Another comment noted that this might be a sign of a dysfunctional organization, and I think there's a lot of truth there -- where systems have grown to such complexity that people involved in a larger project can't keep the whole thing in their head, and you get groups of people sort of faking it, assuming other people can fill in the details, and not wanting to appear ignorant about areas outside of your expertise. I've been in other organizations (and even within this one) where my stupid questions revealed nothing new except that I had to go back and do some studying before I could usefully contribute. I remember when I took a course in General Relativity as an undergraduate; I was much more math/CS focused than most people in the class, who were mostly physics people. And we would get together in study groups, and although I was respected for my general intelligence, it became clear that the questions I was asking were simply not the right ones -- that a physical/geometric intuition was something I did not have. In other words, I was actually the stupid one. Much later I took a course in differential geometry, and eventually started seeing how it made sense mathematically, but I could never really connect it back to physical intuition. I think the problem that broke me was talking about the behavior of a point mass, and I had literally no idea how to attack that with the tools we had.
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- saeranv 5y ago
  Yes, and I would argue this is one of the goals of asking basic questions. Specifically, when asking foundational questions, one of the objectives I keep in mind is to figure out the scope and my ability to understand the scope of the problem. Understand where that boundary exists is useful information. Personally, I don't really care about this second-order effect that asking such questions might identify others that don't understand the problem correctly. I think it's, as you say, creating its own bias that pollutes your thinking. I've worked with enough experts outside of my own domain expertise, that this is not something that happens often.
atulatul 5y ago
->nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about I have seen a few people unwilling to admit that they don't know...when they're supposed to know. The easiest way out they come up with is 'we will discuss this offline'.
khalilravanna 5y ago
IMO this is the hallmark of a good engineer. One of my absolute favorite engineers/mentors did this. Having just one of these people in the room can be a huge differentiator in problem solving in a group setting.
ravenstine 5y ago
This is a useful skill to employ, though at the same time the frequent need of it is a sign of a dysfunctional system. Not always, but a lot of the time, I think. For one, many of these issues would be avoided if, for example, engineers were included in meetings with decision makers and designers during early phases of development, rather than introduce engineers to effectively tell them what to do now that all the decisions have been made absent any shared knowledge of how things can work under the hood. Not only could this result in reduced time spent, but it could result in less time performing re-iterations once engineering concludes that a request/feature is impractical. Impracticalities or better alternatives should be discovered as early in the process as possible, not later, because inevitably wasted time will be made up for via shortcuts and duct tape. Unless a company really cares about good craftsmanship and not releasing something until it's in an adequate state, quality will almost certainly be sacrificed. Playing dumb, if you will, has served me well, yet it is also odd to me just how often it needs to be employed in the field of software.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  You call it dysfunctional but I think it's just a communication technique to accelerate learning, like the author describes, that can be used in a plethora of situations and not just business meetings.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    Oh, I definitely agree. My point, and maybe you still wouldn't agree, is that it can be a good technique to use under ideal or adequate circumstances yet also be a sign of functional weakness if it needs to be used too frequently. Plenty of otherwise good things can be signs of dysfunction. An example could be a workplace where people are free to chill, do what they want, ride scooters, play games, etc., which can be really healthy and good for creativity, but also may be a sign of weak leadership and nothing actually getting done (wasting time and jeopardizing the future of teams). Having process is usually better than no process at all, but process can also waste time and be counterproductive. In other words, nothing is necessarily to be viewed as good or bad.
somethoughts 5y ago
Just to provide additional context... This works and should be encouraged if you are indeed very smart and very quick, typically introverted and are actually going to be rolling up your sleeves to pitch in. This approach is painful for everyone else and should be discouraged if you are a very extroverted and very non-technical person with no plan on actually helping out whatsoever with the actual execution on solving the problem at hand and really are only contributing to look smart in front of any leadership who happens to be in the room. Definitely be aware of the Dunning–Kruger effect - which is a cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.
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alexashka 5y ago
Imagine your comment being made in a meeting I got pulled into. I brace myself. I'm going to waste your time. This is super obvious. Here it goes: so uh, why do you continue to work with incompetent idiots instead of finding a workplace where people know what they are talking about instead?
- zamfi 5y ago
  Poor communication does not imply everyone involved is incompetent idiots. It's unfortunate, and important to address, but if you quit any project every time there is inadequate communication, you'll never get anything done. Assumptions are inevitable. They get harder to question the longer they go unquestioned. Newcomers to a group can see them better. Perhaps cutting people some slack and helping them work better by asking basic questions is a skill we all need to learn.
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  - alexashka 5y ago
    If you want to cut people slack, go cut them slack. Here's a question: look around you, you think cutting slack is what's needed? If you think so, alright then. I don't.
    - zamfi 5y ago
      I work with good people, and when they screw up, I cut them some slack. Everyone sometimes screws up. Some more than others. Some distractingly so, and some so often that it's not worth continuing the relationship. But the mere fact that someone at some point screws up does not make them irredeemable. So, yes, I think cutting people slack is important. This is totally orthogonal to being qualified for a job, or being good, or any other attributes people have that puts them out of their depth. If you work with a bunch of unqualified poseurs, then sure, slack isn't what's missing, and you should quit. But if you find yourself in that situation very often, I'd be asking different questions...
simonw 5y ago
A lesson I've learned over time is that it's incredibly common for people within a company to have very different mental models of what different terms mean - especially if they work in different teams or departments, but sometimes even people the same team. My favourite examples are things like "what is a user?" - the marketing department may be counting leads generated, engineers are thinking about records in a database table, some other team may think of users as company or group accounts. This holds true for all kinds of other things too. You might have a project called "the login optimization project" and find that some people think it's about page load performance while others think it's about increased conversions. For this reason, I'm always ready to ask the stupid questions.
- Gareth321 5y ago
  > "what is a user?" I have spent far more time than should be necessary aligning on terms like "customer" and "user."
mike_ivanov 5y ago
Happens to me all the time.
bostonsre 5y ago
Being able to say I don't know and I don't understand is incredibly powerful.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
Probably because of status loss. Do they acknowledge your perceptiveness, intelligence and intellectual honesty after you demonstrate it each time? It would undermine their own status.
bedobi 5y ago
This is me all the time haha sometimes I really am just "stupid" and the only one in the room without a clue, but many many times my stupidity has revealed no one really has any idea what they or the others are talking about. I'm grateful to my parents or whatever it was that enabled me to not take myself too seriously and not care too much about people thinking I'm stupid, even at work, and even though it may cost me dearly in terms of career progression. (because I do think not all but many people who get ahead do so by very successfully avoiding being perceived as stupid, even if they are)
anm89 5y ago
This is such an eye opening experience, especially when you are new to the corporate world. It's amazing how frequently fancily dressed, well speaking, high paid people sit in rooms and essentially role play being adults while just having absolutely no clue what is going on.
lugged 5y ago
This happened to me recently, A team I work with sometimes was blocked on a couple of PRs for about a week. I needed one of the team members for something and their lead wasn't doing much to help remove his roadblocks to helping me so I stepped in asking my really basic questions about what they were trying to achieve. Within about 30 minutes we released one PR and deleted the other. The one we deleted was blocking the other but there wasn't actally a need for it due to some spec change that happened earlier, just nobody could figure out why it was needed or what needed to be finished before it could ship.
dragonsky 5y ago
This is my life at the moment. Even when I think I may know what is being discussed, experience has shown that a lot of people will try and fake it and being the idiot who doesn’t have a clue and needs it explained is useful for everyone. I don’t know what it is about the IT trade, but so many people seem to find it difficult to admit that knowing everything is impossible.
hnarn 5y ago
> you would think the sinking feeling I get before I brace myself to look stupid would go away I can highly recommend reading, or listening to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Asking "stupid" questions does not automatically make you intelligent, but it is a trait of highly intelligent people, exactly because of the reasons you describe. We all know the story about how Newton asked why an apple fell to the ground, surely a lot of people would have thought you're a total idiot for asking that, and yet at the same time no-one would have been able to explain why. The reason stupid questions are uncomfortable is that you're very likely to insinuate other people don't know the answer to a simple question, and we don't like making other people uncomfortable. Which is why you have to be humble when asking them.
lcrmorin 5y ago
I work for the government so really know this feeling. I have a funny exemple in mind. Months ago I got pulled into a meeting because 'I know data'. The phrasing alone was a red flag. Lots of high level people in the meeting. Like 10 people, each one payed at least twice as much as me. The goal is to transfer data that is too big for our 'standard pipelines'. They are discussing building a whole new pipeline, contractors would be involved and all. I asked 'stupid questions': "- How big is the data we are discussing ? - '200 Go' - is it recurring ? - No - is it sensitive ? - No - Why don't we buy a 50$ 1to hard drive and transfer the data manually ?" Last question was followed by the longest silence I ever heard in a meeting... I wasn't invited the next meetings. I heard it took them more than 5 other meetings to reconsider my solution. An intern has finally been sent to buy the hard drive last week.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  I wonder if they felt that your idea made them look stupid / incompetent. (Which it seems they were) Maybe then they didn't want you in the meetings? (Whilst the idea was good so that's what they did in the end) (200 Go = GB I suppose)
- cjalmeida 5y ago
  The problem was throwing the solution at their faces like that. The key to looking stupid is not making others look stupid. There are ways to create roundabouts so that the solution looks “elegant” but only after “hard thought”. There’s also the risk that the simple solution has some real limitation (eg. some regulatory issue) then you’ll will indeed look stupid
dominotw 5y ago
> I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. > I brace myself to be the idiot. I don't think not knowing something makes one an idiot. Having hard time understanding something does. I don't think your example applies here.
mmarq 5y ago
This is feasible as long as your expertise is recognised in the organisation or you are in a position of power or your organisation is open to this kind of behaviour (quite often it isn’t the case). A junior asking this kind of questions in the wrong organisation may help fixing the problem at hand, assuming they are taken seriously, but they are likely to hinder their career progress if they repeat this behaviour too often. In many many many organisations looking smart is way more important than being smart. (I’m not saying it’s a good thing)

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago

I do this all the time too and have observed the same results! I ask a lot of dumb questions like "what does XYZ stand for?" and "what was the original problem you were trying to solve by taking this course of action?". Even though I always have that same sinking feeling, usually by the 4th or 5th question I have a very clear idea of what's going on.

Thorentis 5y ago

This is essentially the Socratic method. Arriving at a shared understanding through the asking of questions. I employ this technique regularly and it rarely fails me.

kfarr 5y ago

Yes and it feels like the older I get the more I have to be the one that plays this role to ask these basic questions as younger professionals are fearful to look dumb in front of others

cbtacy 5y ago
The fear of looking stupid is a profound motivator in many professions. If you want to understand why so many of the stories posted about people using this technique are of more senior folks or people with more authority (bosses, mentors, professors, etc), this is why. Being willing to potentially "look stupid" requires enormous self-confidence.
- mewpmewp2 5y ago
  And it may very well be that consequences for looking stupid are worse when you are junior. So it could be a natural progression.

singlow 5y ago

I identify with this situation but my feelings about it are a bit different, although not intentionally. This mirrors my general disconnect with the article. In this situation I feel some anxiety or hesitation about asking these questions, but I don't feel it as a fear of appearing stupid. Instead the anxiety seems to come from worrying that I am annoying or offending everyone with questions about things that are obvious. I have no way of knowing which question is going to reveal the problem, so I will need to shotgun questions. I know that some people that I work with get this completely and will cooperate. Others will get defensive or tune out, so I need to find a balance or tone to try to avoid that. It is similar to when I did tech support as a teenager and someone would call with a problem, wanting a tech sent to their house. I would start asking questions about the problem and they would not want to spend 5 minutes going through a few steps to try to solve it over the phone. I never felt that they thought I was stupid, I just felt they were impatient. Maybe they did think I was stupid, but I was so sure that I could find the answer that I never considered that.

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codazoda 5y ago
I did support when I was in my late teens and I ALWAYS started at the very bottom, with the questions that seemed obvious, and worked my way up. Most callers thought it was annoying, so I would often prepare them for the silly simple stuff I was about to ask and ask them to humor me. It was especially painful if I was the 3rd person they had talked to. I guess I still work this way although I've fallen out of the habit of warning people and asking them to humor me.
- genewitch 5y ago
  The "humor me" tier 2 or 3 tech support people are the best. By the time I've called in I've already done the usual stuff, that's why I called, at least they crack me up "what color is the light on the left side" or whatever, not just silence and clacking and background yelling of tier 1 while they "wait for me to power cycle". Turns out I absolutely cannot do tier 3 support, but I can do 1 and 2 for friends and family and I'm the "whiz" or whatever. Tier three, for me, was basically me in a bad mood talking to me in a bad mood, in order to gatekeep the poor dev/DBA/NOC that had to actually fix things. No thx!

mywittyname 5y ago

One of the best people I've ever worked with used this approach. "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, <here's my interpretation of what you just said>." were two phrases she used all the time. I am surprised at how difficult it has been to emulate her technique. Feeling comfortable asking the obvious questions is one half of the battle, but the other, more difficult half, is knowing what obvious questions to ask. Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no. She knew how to ask them in such a way that gets the person talking in greater detail. It's kind of like being a great interviewer, there's a technique to asking questions in a manner which gets someone talking.

gremloni 5y ago
Same. “Just making sure I understand this correctly… stop me if I’m wrong” has worked wonders for my ability to contribute to a meeting.
nimbius 5y ago
the problem with this approach is that it makes building trust very difficult, as trust is based on a combination of character and competence. inquisitiveness during problem solving is admirable and good, but in the article many of the applications of 'looking stupid' only serve to render the author untrustworthy.
- pksebben 5y ago
  I know this might come off as adversarial, but might that say more about your metrics for trustworthiness than the party at question? Which bullets from the article would you consider untrustworthy?
mandeepj 5y ago
> Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no. I guess you might be asking straight up binary questions like - is it happening due to xyz? Maybe, changing the question format to something like - what do you think could be the cause behind _fill the situation here___? Just my humble opinion.

tomxor 5y ago

> So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have. I've had similar situations, it feels analogous to group based "rubber ducking"... having someone ask the questions perceived to be known or obvious by the existing groups can be extremely beneficial for all kinds of reasons, in the same way that a rubber duck (real or imagined) will get you to re-evaluate all of your assumptions and usually get you to find the assumption that's incorrect or problematic.

dennis_jeeves 5y ago

>That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. Wait till you see the fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions of established 'science'. It will pale in comparison with anything you have seen before.

sharadov 5y ago

Early in my career, I was conscious of asking these questions, so as to not appear like a fool, I thought I was expected to know the answers. I took a remote job a while back and realized that the only way to be successful in my role was to keep asking questions, learning about systems and the product. I did not care if my questions seemed stupid. I just asked away. And, it helped..immensely!

coralreef 5y ago

> That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. This is debugging 101. You have assumptions about how a system works, but the output isn't matching those assumptions. You walk backwards over your assumptions and test them to see if they are true. Eventually you get to the precise place where your assumption is wildly different than the output, and there is your bug. The more systems (or people) involved, the longer it takes, the more complexity.

Buttons840 5y ago
Yep, eventually you're asking things like, "does the variable called 'username' contain the username?" Not too long ago I found that 'username', in fact, did not contain the username.
- coralreef 5y ago
  I once had a co-worker at a small company (2 developers, me and him). In the spirit of doing less work, he proposed to me changing the meaning of "someProperty" to mean something different, without changing the name of that property. Also, it was a boolean; so he wanted true values to actually represent false, and vice versa. I politely pushed back on that one.

Narann 5y ago

Such behavior can be a good thing, but you could fall in your own bias thinking you know the problem better than them, to finally realize the problem outpace your scope and you are just impacted as anyone in the room. It happen for me once, and this was an humility lesson. Now I keep in mind I can feel I understand the problem then realize later I was all wrong too.

andrewla 5y ago
For sure! Another comment noted that this might be a sign of a dysfunctional organization, and I think there's a lot of truth there -- where systems have grown to such complexity that people involved in a larger project can't keep the whole thing in their head, and you get groups of people sort of faking it, assuming other people can fill in the details, and not wanting to appear ignorant about areas outside of your expertise. I've been in other organizations (and even within this one) where my stupid questions revealed nothing new except that I had to go back and do some studying before I could usefully contribute. I remember when I took a course in General Relativity as an undergraduate; I was much more math/CS focused than most people in the class, who were mostly physics people. And we would get together in study groups, and although I was respected for my general intelligence, it became clear that the questions I was asking were simply not the right ones -- that a physical/geometric intuition was something I did not have. In other words, I was actually the stupid one. Much later I took a course in differential geometry, and eventually started seeing how it made sense mathematically, but I could never really connect it back to physical intuition. I think the problem that broke me was talking about the behavior of a point mass, and I had literally no idea how to attack that with the tools we had.
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saeranv 5y ago
Yes, and I would argue this is one of the goals of asking basic questions. Specifically, when asking foundational questions, one of the objectives I keep in mind is to figure out the scope and my ability to understand the scope of the problem. Understand where that boundary exists is useful information. Personally, I don't really care about this second-order effect that asking such questions might identify others that don't understand the problem correctly. I think it's, as you say, creating its own bias that pollutes your thinking. I've worked with enough experts outside of my own domain expertise, that this is not something that happens often.

atulatul 5y ago

->nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about I have seen a few people unwilling to admit that they don't know...when they're supposed to know. The easiest way out they come up with is 'we will discuss this offline'.

khalilravanna 5y ago

IMO this is the hallmark of a good engineer. One of my absolute favorite engineers/mentors did this. Having just one of these people in the room can be a huge differentiator in problem solving in a group setting.

ravenstine 5y ago

This is a useful skill to employ, though at the same time the frequent need of it is a sign of a dysfunctional system. Not always, but a lot of the time, I think. For one, many of these issues would be avoided if, for example, engineers were included in meetings with decision makers and designers during early phases of development, rather than introduce engineers to effectively tell them what to do now that all the decisions have been made absent any shared knowledge of how things can work under the hood. Not only could this result in reduced time spent, but it could result in less time performing re-iterations once engineering concludes that a request/feature is impractical. Impracticalities or better alternatives should be discovered as early in the process as possible, not later, because inevitably wasted time will be made up for via shortcuts and duct tape. Unless a company really cares about good craftsmanship and not releasing something until it's in an adequate state, quality will almost certainly be sacrificed. Playing dumb, if you will, has served me well, yet it is also odd to me just how often it needs to be employed in the field of software.

ativzzz 5y ago
You call it dysfunctional but I think it's just a communication technique to accelerate learning, like the author describes, that can be used in a plethora of situations and not just business meetings.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Oh, I definitely agree. My point, and maybe you still wouldn't agree, is that it can be a good technique to use under ideal or adequate circumstances yet also be a sign of functional weakness if it needs to be used too frequently. Plenty of otherwise good things can be signs of dysfunction. An example could be a workplace where people are free to chill, do what they want, ride scooters, play games, etc., which can be really healthy and good for creativity, but also may be a sign of weak leadership and nothing actually getting done (wasting time and jeopardizing the future of teams). Having process is usually better than no process at all, but process can also waste time and be counterproductive. In other words, nothing is necessarily to be viewed as good or bad.

somethoughts 5y ago

Just to provide additional context... This works and should be encouraged if you are indeed very smart and very quick, typically introverted and are actually going to be rolling up your sleeves to pitch in. This approach is painful for everyone else and should be discouraged if you are a very extroverted and very non-technical person with no plan on actually helping out whatsoever with the actual execution on solving the problem at hand and really are only contributing to look smart in front of any leadership who happens to be in the room. Definitely be aware of the Dunning–Kruger effect - which is a cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.

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alexashka 5y ago

Imagine your comment being made in a meeting I got pulled into. I brace myself. I'm going to waste your time. This is super obvious. Here it goes: so uh, why do you continue to work with incompetent idiots instead of finding a workplace where people know what they are talking about instead?

zamfi 5y ago
Poor communication does not imply everyone involved is incompetent idiots. It's unfortunate, and important to address, but if you quit any project every time there is inadequate communication, you'll never get anything done. Assumptions are inevitable. They get harder to question the longer they go unquestioned. Newcomers to a group can see them better. Perhaps cutting people some slack and helping them work better by asking basic questions is a skill we all need to learn.
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- alexashka 5y ago
  If you want to cut people slack, go cut them slack. Here's a question: look around you, you think cutting slack is what's needed? If you think so, alright then. I don't.
  - zamfi 5y ago
    I work with good people, and when they screw up, I cut them some slack. Everyone sometimes screws up. Some more than others. Some distractingly so, and some so often that it's not worth continuing the relationship. But the mere fact that someone at some point screws up does not make them irredeemable. So, yes, I think cutting people slack is important. This is totally orthogonal to being qualified for a job, or being good, or any other attributes people have that puts them out of their depth. If you work with a bunch of unqualified poseurs, then sure, slack isn't what's missing, and you should quit. But if you find yourself in that situation very often, I'd be asking different questions...

simonw 5y ago

A lesson I've learned over time is that it's incredibly common for people within a company to have very different mental models of what different terms mean - especially if they work in different teams or departments, but sometimes even people the same team. My favourite examples are things like "what is a user?" - the marketing department may be counting leads generated, engineers are thinking about records in a database table, some other team may think of users as company or group accounts. This holds true for all kinds of other things too. You might have a project called "the login optimization project" and find that some people think it's about page load performance while others think it's about increased conversions. For this reason, I'm always ready to ask the stupid questions.

Gareth321 5y ago
> "what is a user?" I have spent far more time than should be necessary aligning on terms like "customer" and "user."

mike_ivanov 5y ago

Happens to me all the time.

bostonsre 5y ago

Being able to say I don't know and I don't understand is incredibly powerful.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

Probably because of status loss. Do they acknowledge your perceptiveness, intelligence and intellectual honesty after you demonstrate it each time? It would undermine their own status.

bedobi 5y ago

This is me all the time haha sometimes I really am just "stupid" and the only one in the room without a clue, but many many times my stupidity has revealed no one really has any idea what they or the others are talking about. I'm grateful to my parents or whatever it was that enabled me to not take myself too seriously and not care too much about people thinking I'm stupid, even at work, and even though it may cost me dearly in terms of career progression. (because I do think not all but many people who get ahead do so by very successfully avoiding being perceived as stupid, even if they are)

anm89 5y ago

This is such an eye opening experience, especially when you are new to the corporate world. It's amazing how frequently fancily dressed, well speaking, high paid people sit in rooms and essentially role play being adults while just having absolutely no clue what is going on.

lugged 5y ago

This happened to me recently, A team I work with sometimes was blocked on a couple of PRs for about a week. I needed one of the team members for something and their lead wasn't doing much to help remove his roadblocks to helping me so I stepped in asking my really basic questions about what they were trying to achieve. Within about 30 minutes we released one PR and deleted the other. The one we deleted was blocking the other but there wasn't actally a need for it due to some spec change that happened earlier, just nobody could figure out why it was needed or what needed to be finished before it could ship.

dragonsky 5y ago

This is my life at the moment. Even when I think I may know what is being discussed, experience has shown that a lot of people will try and fake it and being the idiot who doesn’t have a clue and needs it explained is useful for everyone. I don’t know what it is about the IT trade, but so many people seem to find it difficult to admit that knowing everything is impossible.

hnarn 5y ago

> you would think the sinking feeling I get before I brace myself to look stupid would go away I can highly recommend reading, or listening to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Asking "stupid" questions does not automatically make you intelligent, but it is a trait of highly intelligent people, exactly because of the reasons you describe. We all know the story about how Newton asked why an apple fell to the ground, surely a lot of people would have thought you're a total idiot for asking that, and yet at the same time no-one would have been able to explain why. The reason stupid questions are uncomfortable is that you're very likely to insinuate other people don't know the answer to a simple question, and we don't like making other people uncomfortable. Which is why you have to be humble when asking them.

lcrmorin 5y ago

I work for the government so really know this feeling. I have a funny exemple in mind. Months ago I got pulled into a meeting because 'I know data'. The phrasing alone was a red flag. Lots of high level people in the meeting. Like 10 people, each one payed at least twice as much as me. The goal is to transfer data that is too big for our 'standard pipelines'. They are discussing building a whole new pipeline, contractors would be involved and all. I asked 'stupid questions': "- How big is the data we are discussing ? - '200 Go' - is it recurring ? - No - is it sensitive ? - No - Why don't we buy a 50$ 1to hard drive and transfer the data manually ?" Last question was followed by the longest silence I ever heard in a meeting... I wasn't invited the next meetings. I heard it took them more than 5 other meetings to reconsider my solution. An intern has finally been sent to buy the hard drive last week.

cutemonster 5y ago
I wonder if they felt that your idea made them look stupid / incompetent. (Which it seems they were) Maybe then they didn't want you in the meetings? (Whilst the idea was good so that's what they did in the end) (200 Go = GB I suppose)
cjalmeida 5y ago
The problem was throwing the solution at their faces like that. The key to looking stupid is not making others look stupid. There are ways to create roundabouts so that the solution looks “elegant” but only after “hard thought”. There’s also the risk that the simple solution has some real limitation (eg. some regulatory issue) then you’ll will indeed look stupid

dominotw 5y ago

> I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. > I brace myself to be the idiot. I don't think not knowing something makes one an idiot. Having hard time understanding something does. I don't think your example applies here.

mmarq 5y ago

This is feasible as long as your expertise is recognised in the organisation or you are in a position of power or your organisation is open to this kind of behaviour (quite often it isn’t the case). A junior asking this kind of questions in the wrong organisation may help fixing the problem at hand, assuming they are taken seriously, but they are likely to hinder their career progress if they repeat this behaviour too often. In many many many organisations looking smart is way more important than being smart. (I’m not saying it’s a good thing)