The big one: you don’t want to assume anything. Don’t assume. Stop assuming. Stop guessing He goes on to explain this in much more detail and I can echo a

The big one: you don’t want to assume anything. Don’t assume. Stop assuming. Stop guessing He goes on to explain this in much more detail and I can echo a lot of this from my own experience. I too have been "the new guy that asks too many questions, we wanna be done with backlog maintenance already!". I've also had this experience in some consulting gigs before where they asked me to help out with something "because don't you know SSL?". "Sure" I said (coz yeah, I had set up an self-signed cert for my home server once ...). All it took was to get the developer that had been stuck for a day to get something running (don't remember any specifics) to actually take a step back and check all the assumptions he made. I basically just asked him very simple and basic questions about the problem and whenever he told me that he'd checked something, I made him show me that whatever he claimed was true. Sometimes it was. One time it wasn't and we found the problem. Once we had rooted out the assumption, it was easy to fix the actual problem. More than a day of a highly paid senior developer wasted and figured out by the "dumb rookie consultant". Sounds a bit like the recent story about "asking dumb questions" ;)