My golden skill at my last job was asking questions. My director, who was a peer at a prior startup, knew this about me, and dragged me into meetings where my c

My golden skill at my last job was asking questions. My director, who was a peer at a prior startup, knew this about me, and dragged me into meetings where my core interest was only peripherally related. I often spent time in the meeting with my head slightly tipped back and my eyes closed, because I would have already read through the prepared slide deck twice before the meeting, and I wanted to concentrate on what was being said. A lot of times, people thought I was asleep. They were wrong. One of the first meetings at this fortune 100 company, a chip architect was running through the design (too many details) and he mentioned one particular communication link they were going to use, because that was the only port available on the companion chip they were using to constrain costs. I immediately opened my eyes and asked one question on the bandwidth/latency for one use case, that would be heavily used, and the room went silent. The architect tried to wave it off, but another hardware engineer I had worked with for three years at a prior job said he would run the numbers on it and get an answer. In the end, the design was cancelled, because that one flaw (there were likely others) meant the design would never work. People at that company didn't know me well, yet, and as I said, I wasn't core to many of the meetings I attended, and I spent most of the meeting sitting quietly with my eyes closed. Never assume I am sleeping. And don't try to wave off my 'stupid' questions. I ask the stupid questions, because if you cannot address it with a simple direct answer, then you don't understand the stupid question.