The article is right but its ambitions are too low. Everyone needs to ask helpful questions in the right way and at the right time. This is simple but not easy.

The article is right but its ambitions are too low. Everyone needs to ask helpful questions in the right way and at the right time. This is simple but not easy. I'm a staff-level engineer at a well-known tech company. One of the most important things I do is ask simple/"dumb" questions of other very smart but more junior engineers. I try to ask questions they haven't considered or explained well. I ask questions that poke at the assumptions and basic tenets of the problem. I ask honest, non-leading questions to which I genuinely want to know the answer. Other kinds of feedback are not appropriate questions. My Kubernetes and other SRE-style knowledge is limited, so I ask dumb questions there. Sometimes the response is "uhm this is a basic concept" but every time I've done that other engs in the room tell me they were afraid of asking the very same questions. (And tbh many times the answers point to a lack of understanding of fundamentals.) So the key is to be genuinely curious and optimistic, try to guide others to ask and answer similar questions on their own and present them at the right level of detail in their presentation/documentation. And to encourage all engineers regardless of seniority to do the same. A key point is doing this at the right times. During a 10-person meeting with directors is not the right time to ask questions that could send things back to the drawing-board. Such meetings are ceremony. If there are big questions about feasibility etc at a 10-person director-level meeting, you need to go into backroom fire-fighting mode to figure out how to save the project and let everyone save face. In the moment is almost never the right time. If there are tech problems or questions, ask the small group of people who did the thinking, and ask them in a low-stakes setting. All questions must be asked in good-faith to gain any level of respect and overall progress for everyone involved. Questions are NOT an opportunity to show off, to politick, or to start lots of little fires that everyone must put out before proceeding. This is half the art of questions at senior and staff levels: when to ask them, to whom to ask them, and how to help guide the action based on the answer even if you disagree with the conclusions.