My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face and tend to talk a big game. As a team lead, I try to use language which expresses any doubts or knowledge gaps I have so that others in my team feel comfortable doing it as well. But a key aspect is that you have to really know your stuff in certain areas because you need to inspire others to mirror you... They won't try to mirror you if they don't respect you, based on your technical ability.
You need to demonstrate deep knowledge in some areas and need to demonstrate excellent reasoning abilities before you can safely ask dumb questions IMO. I try to find the specific strengths and weaknesses of my team members. I give constructive criticism for weaknesses but always try to identify and acknowledge each person's unique superpower; what makes them really stand out within the team. If people feel secure in their 'superpower', then they can be vulnerable in other areas and still feel confident. It's important to correctly identify the 'superpower' though because you don't want a Junior honing a skill that they don't naturally possess or you don't want them to be calling shots when they should be asking for help.
My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face
tend to talk a big game
As a team lead, I try to use language which expresses any doubts or knowledge gaps I have so that others in my team feel comfortable doing it as well
superpower
About finding the superpower of each team member; after working with someone for a few months, I start to notice certain patterns in how they think. Sometimes there might be something they say once or a question they ask which makes me view them more favorably than before. Maybe they're fast, good at assembling stuff or slow but good at building stable core components. Maybe they're similar to me or maybe they have a skill I don't have or a certain interest/focus or way to approach problems that is different from me but is beneficial to the project and/or team.
It's a bit like playing a weird game of chess where you can't see the pieces properly at the beginning so everyone looks like a pawn initially; But then over time you discover that one person is a knight, another is a bishop, another is a queen... And you adapt your strategy as your visibility improves.
But forced RTO and only 10 days off per year is enough to keep me away ;)
Even as a lead I ask the dumb question when no one else does just because when i can see the look in people faces or realize no one is chiming in the dumb question is needed to ensure everyone drives the point home. I've never been met with any sort of looking down upon nor do i discourage any of my staff - quite the opposite - I champion them for being willing to speak up.
Some questions really are dumb and bring no value to the table.
The key is knowing which is which, and that is the part that comes with experience.
They do tell you that the person asking them either isn't getting it, which is valuable information, or that they are trying to ask questions for the sake of it, which is also valuable information.
But yes on a personal level, being senior enough in my career, I’d rather be thought of as less skilled by asking questions before the s hits the fan, than execute and mismanage a project that I didn’t ask enough questions on. The latter has more consequences tbh.
Sounds like your manager felt that he need to provide at least some feedback and it is best/safest he could come up with.
Absolutely. If the company I work for happens to be one that's so crappy that I'd get fired for questioning things, it's better to find that out as soon as possible. That's not a company that's worth my time and attention.
I wouldn't say discouraging it will be the norm across most places in Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
I had read it about AU and JP and had read about the Jante thing, but the article says it is there in some other countries too. Probably exists everywhere in some form.
I wonder if people here have experienced anything like that. My guess is yes.
But that is about attacking success stories, not about attacking you for not knowing something. I know you said reverse, just spelling out they're different.
Win an award? Get a callout for effort? Rest of the office will probably dunk on you. Varying in scale from a day or two of jokes to career ruining.
But... Ask the meaning of an acronym in a meeting, or say you don't know how to do something, and you'll probably just be given a name to ask.
Graduate, Junior, Senior, Team Lead, - my title hasn't mattered to the response
(I believe you when you say that most of yours are like this.)
A lot of early signs of problems, such as critical information becoming tribal knowledge instead of being documented, are revealed when asking the second kind of questions.
Whenever I don’t understand something I say something like: "Uh, I’m probably the only one here, but I don’t get it…"
PFM - Pure Fucking Magic
I've only once ever had anyone actually ask what it means... essentially it's used as an abstraction for a complex process that would be excessive to explain in context.
I asked, after the meeting.
The seniors were very understanding, and more importantly it raised important questions about backups, dev vs prod pipelines, etc.
But you can bet my cousin was super embarrassed by it, and saving face was a big part of it.
The place I work at is in the middle of a new CEO’s process of breaking the company. The company can’t go out of business, but we’ll set stuff on fire for another 12-18 months.
Asking stupid questions almost goes hands in glove with "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission." A lot of times, you're better off just doing something. Asking a simple question or making something happen saves a lot of grief more often than not. Understanding is important.
A product manager can definitely say things that would make me lose a bit of respect for a fellow senior engineer.
I can also see how juniors have more leeway to weigh in on things they absolutely don't understand. Crazy ideas and constructive criticism is welcome from all corners, but at some level I also start expecting some more basic competence.
I've worked with people from Korea who took me 100% seriously when I said the architecture was too complex and hard to work with slowing down velocity, and although they did end up keeping it there was no outward indication of lost face and they did put in the effort to justify their thinking.
I've also worked with some British, Greek, and Russian people who were completely unwilling to listen to any feedback from coworkers, only order them around.
Even within a person: I know a self-identified communist, who is very open minded about anything except politics.
"Why the f*ck are you asking, you should know this"
or
"Why the f*ck can you not look that up"
edit: There's an entire chapter of the internet with "LMGTFY" responses because people ask questions.
or
"Isn't it f*cking obvious"
or
"Do I have to f*cking spell it out for you"
There's a strong chance that I am autistic, which means, yes, I need people to be (more) explicit.
AI has done a hell of a good job making it easier for me to search for subtexts that I typically miss. And I receive less of the negative feedback when I have something to ask that does help.
> "Why the f*ck are you asking, you should know this"
Because you mentioned NZ: my father, a toolmaker, said there was a huge difference between Europe and NZ. In Germany/Netherlands, he'd be working under a more senior toolmaker. When he took a job in NZ and asked the boss something, as would have been the proper thing to do in Europe, he got a response just like that: because he was the expert, and his NZ boss was just a manager.
edit: well, except when you search the documentation and get (literally) 70+ results because you don't know the exact phrasing used in the self hosted wiki...
Or, when it's a question that is domain specific (meaning that the SME is supposed to know it, which you only know if you are... an SME...)
etc
: “hey bob, I looked here and here and here and didn’t find the correct information. Can you show me where to look or tell me the answer so I can document it”
Because most people don’t bother doing the tiniest amount of their own research before asking dumb questions it becomes a huge headache to answer the same thing a million times.
However, if you can show that you did put in the effort to look up the answer first people will be much more willing to help.
More of, ask do the quick google search or check the doc before asking that question. If the quick search or look into the doc does not contain the answer, ask.
Meta? Ask questions anytime.
Amazon? Not so much.
When you don't realize what you can't do, you can do some pretty cool stuff
It was anybody’s guess if they really didn’t understand the topic or if they were reading the room, but it was always appreciated.
I strongly disagree, a Senior who cannot ask a "dumb question" is a useless developer to me. Ask away, we want to figure things out, we're not mind readers. Every good senior developer I know asks questions and admits when they don't know things. This is humility and in my eyes is a strong market for a good Senior Developer. The entire point of our job is to ask questions (to ourselves typically the most) and figure out the answers (the code).
Juniors could or should ask more questions, and by the time you're a Senior, you're asking key questions no matter how dumb they sound.
This seems almost entirely wrong to me? That anyone, at any level of seniority, can ask "dumb questions" and give signal about "nonsense abstractions" seems a property of any healthy organization. That only juniors can do this doesn't just seem wrong, it seems backwards. I would expect seniors to have the clearest idea on whether abstractions make sense, not juniors.
They are the most insecure, however, no knowing who will be annoyed, shown up, embarassed by that question if it suggests that some past decisions were wrong.
Junior devs do that naturally (if you have the culture) because they don’t know anything already. It’s great
Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...
What isn’t viewed positively is when you refuse to accept a decision after it’s been made and your concerns have been heard. People get pissed if you keep relitigating the same points over and over again
Your job is to make sure that the decision makers, when they're not you, have the information needed to make competent decisions. You should keep arguing when (a) there is credible reason to believe that important information has not been heard or understood or (b) when new information has come to light that you credibly believe might change the decision. In the absence of those two, your should accept that you have done your job and should let your managers to theirs, even if you disagree with them. Bring it back up when (a) or (b) changes, and not until.
I think this comes down to how you go about asking. You have to take the time to understand what is and how it's seen by others by being curious, reading docs, etc instead of rolling in making assertions disguised as questions to assert authority like so many are wont to do.
I suppose it's possible that I'm the designated court jester and that's why I can get away with questioning, but I don't think that's the case :)
Some of the biggest accidents have happened directly due to this. Like Tenerife where the flight engineer had been listening to the radio and raised doubts about the runway being free but was ignored by the overconfident captain.
It takes months of dysfunction until the customer says "I do not want to work with you anymore" or until the "overtime and over budget" thing suddenly becomes too large and problems show up in numbers. Or until key team suddenly completely decomposes. Every single time I have seen that, multiple people tried to communicate about the issue and were shot down.
It is not like management was always "wholistically" right and everyone down there just dont see big picture or have bad arguments - they usually just do not know what is going on on lower levels. Failure to actually listen, whether because it feels bad or because it would take time is quite common.
Is this a bad thing though? If some technical decision has downside risk, I’d reasonably expect:
- the affected stakeholder to bring it up
- the decision maker to assuage the stakeholder’s concern (happy path) or triage and escalate
As important as I think questioning is, there’s another side of it where people push their own agenda with questions on topics that were decided by other/more senior people hashing it out. At some point this does need to be dealt with. All I see is the yapping questions wasting meeting time, though.
I did work at Stripe, which in places did this pretty well. It still felt like a huge company (this was back in 2022) that had lost part of that spirit depending on org leadership. I had to pull that out of engineers who had been scared out of that level of vulnerability. But building that trust is part of leadership and great people tend to want to question and improve things.
I've given talks on work/life balance -- and I stand by those talks enough to argue with directors and above when needed, though it rarely is -- and an important part of that talk is about how much better it can look when you can intelligently describe the limits of your knowledge, skills, and estimation.
If you get penalized for that, you're just in a shit role with a shit manager. Don't project that on the rest of us.
One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak.
Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experience, it can be a rough go.
You have 1 veteran doctor overseeing 4 learning doctors. For example operating rooms do this, where they will have 4 operating rooms with 4 less experienced anesthesist and then 1 very experienced anesthesist who will rotate between the 4 and is on call for when shit hits the fan.
Honestly I think everyone here is missing the forest for the trees. Juniors their main purpose isn't to "ask questions", it's to turn into capable seniors.
That's also why the whole "slash our junior headcount by 3/4th" we are seeing across the industry is going to massively, massively backfire. AI / LLMs are going to hit a wall (well, they already hit it a while ago), suddenly every is scrambling for seniors but there are none because no one wanted to bear the 'burden' of training juniors to be seniors. You thought dev salaries are insane now? Wait until 4-5 years from now.
A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.
That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons.
What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist.
In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.
And practically, you can have one or two journeymen per master. However, these 2-3 people can in turn support 3-4 more juniors to supply useful work.
This also establishes a fairly natural growth of a person within the company. First you do standard things as told. Then you start doing projects that mostly follow a standard that has worked in the past. And then you start standardizing projects.
AI is now just the scapegoat for an economy wide problem. Execs found "one neat trick", piling junior work on seniors until they quit. While not hiring replacements in order to goose short term profits. Now every company is in the same position where hiring a senior really means hiring 5 seniors to replace the one that had 5 jobs layered on over a few years. This is of course impossible for any mortal to jump into. Now they also dont even have juniors to train up to senior levels.
They're also good at putting company code into ChatGPT.
/snark
It’s damned near impossible to figure out where to spend your time wisely to correct an assumption a human made vs. an AI on a blended pull request. All of the learning that happens during PR review is at risk in this way and I’m not sure where we will get it back yet. (Outside of an AI telling you - which, to be fair, there are some good review bots out there)
The result is interesting. First, juniors are miserable. What used to be a good experience coding and debugging, in a state of flow is now anxiously waiting if an AI could do it or not.
And senior devs are also miserable, getting apprentices used to be fun and profit, working with someone young is uplifting, and now it is gone.
The code quality is going down, Zen cycle interrupted, with the RL cost functions now at the top.
The only ones who are happy are hapless PhDs ;$
Really, juniors are only important because they ask "dumb" questions that can help remove useless abstractions? That your take?
I also don’t believe juniors, kids, seniors, staff, principals, distinguished/fellow should be replaced by AI. I think they WILL be, but they shouldn’t be. AI at Gemini 3 Flash / Claude Opus 4.5 level is capable with help and review of doing a lot of what a lot of devs do currently. It can’t do everything and will fail, but if the business doesn’t care, they’ll cut jobs.
Don’t waste time trying to argue against AI to attempt to save your job. Just learn AI and do your job until you’re no longer needed to even manage it. Or, if you don’t want to, do something else.
That's not how things work in normal times.
But normal times require minimally capable managers, a somewhat competitive economy, and some meritocracy in hiring. I can believe that's how things will work this time, but it's still a stupid way to do it.
Or in other words, the people that get the most value from AI are junior devs, since they still don't know very well plenty of popular environments. It's also useful for seniors that are starting something in a new environment, but those only get 1 or 2 novel contexts at a time, while everything is new for a junior.
Or, in again another set of words, AI enable juniors to add more value more quickly. That makes them more valuable, not less.
Isn't that also the explicit aim of AI replacement, as stupid as it sounds? To me, the idea appear to be separation of money and work, so that economy will be strictly the concern of a metaphorical upper floor, floating in the thin air.
I still think the central issue is the economy. There are more seniors available to fill roles, so filling out junior roles is less desirable. And perhaps "replacing juniors with AI" is just the industry's way of clumsily saving face.
Juniors are just... necessary in the balance, have to little of them and the mid and senior devs will get more and more expensive, so you hire a bunch of juniors, they get trained on job, and it balances it out.
Hell, if company does it right they might underpay junior-turned-senior for decade before they notice and look how industry pay looks like!
Juniors are usually given either grunt or low priority work while seniors get more "important" work.
OTOH, it takes a lot to get your questions on RIGHT EARS when you're a junior, so wouldn't agree with your characterization at all.
One problem there is that people would rather believe the AI is "dumb" than face the facts.
> cargo-culting Stack Overflow
What do you mean by this? I understand “cargo-culting” as building false idols, e.g. wooden headphones and runways to attract airplanes that never come.
example: you have a Windows problem. You search and read that "sfc /scannow" seems a popular answer to Windows problems. You run it without ever understanding what sfc does, whether the tool is relevant to your problem, etc. You are cargo culting a solution.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cargo-cult-programming.htm...
I was never formally trained so I just keep asking "why" until someone proves it all the way. Sales itself is also a lot about asking questions that won't come up to find the heart of the thing people actually want... which is just another side of the coin.
We hire juniors so that we can offload easy but time-consuming work on them while we focus on more important or more difficult problems. We also expect that juniors will eventually gain the skills to solve the more difficult problems as a result of the experience they gain performing the easy tasks.
If we stop hiring juniors now, then we won't have any good senior engineers in 5-10 years.
This is the only role of executives, sales people, account managers. They usually do it with complete and utter confidence too. Vibe-questioning and vibe-instructing other people without a care in the world.
Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall.
Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled.
It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.
At some level, aren’t you describing the age-old process of maturing from junior to mid level to senior in most lines of work, and in most organizations? Isn’t that what advancing in responsibility boils down to: developing subtlety and wisdom and political credibility and organizational context? Learning where the rakes are?
I wish 3 months, or even 3 years, were long enough to fully understand the whys and wherefores and politics of the organizations I cross paths with, and the jungle of systems and code supporting all the kinds of work that happen inside…
What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”.
If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them.
Always love to include a good AI x work thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.