There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers

Above is something I always repeat when someone starts a question with “This is probably a dumb question, but…”. The thought process behind it makes total sense: either a person doesn’t want to waste the time of other people on the team or doesn’t want to look silly, so they start with a nice cushion to fall back on in case somebody answers in a condescending manner. But in reality, this kind of interaction doesn’t help anyone. Let me break down my reasoning.

Asking lots of questions saves time

You know what’s much dumber than asking stupid questions? Carrying on with doing something with an incorrect assumption from the beginning. Many wise people have been heard quoting: “Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups”. Making sure that requirements are well-defined and that you understand them completely is always a good reason to ask yet another question. This ensures that you are not wasting your own time, and then additionally, the time needed for you or another person to notice the mistake and for the corrections to be made. Any mistake, in general, is much cheaper to fix time-wise before any implementation work takes place, and it gets exponentially more expensive with each stage, from QA to production.

It offers a chance to rethink

People are surprisingly adept at forgetting things, overlooking details and jumping to conclusions, so sometimes the simplest of questions can make even the most senior team members take a step back and reassess, or observe the problem from another perspective and notice something new, maybe that an important piece of information is missing or a technical debt that needs to be dealt with first related to that shortcut we took in the previous sprint. Most products are trying to solve difficult problems with edge cases and indirect complexities, otherwise, those should instead be an Excel spreadsheet with a few macros or a WordPress site.

It promotes a culture of communication and collaboration

Very often there is a lot of uncertainty when new features or products are developed, by fostering clear and open communication through encouragement of asking questions we can greatly reduce those uncertainties. When people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas they will be more likely to discuss their work and seek assistance when needed, and you want this kind of cooperation within a team. Everyone can behave in this way, but it’s especially important for more senior members as they should aim for their behaviour being what others look up to, and if they are acting like a dismissive smartarses others will be afraid to speak for fear of looking stupid.

But please be respectful of others’ time

Asking questions is good, regardless if you think it’s a small question or a big question, especially as a more junior team member, you don’t understand the whole domain enough to know how good the question is, and sometime the same question will be asked multiple times, sometimes it’s just that complicated and that’s fine (this is a good indication that it should be documented). With that said, if you asked your colleague a question and they’ve invested time and effort to answer you, then you should invest the effort to remember what was said, or even better, write it down, because it can get irritating to be asked the same question multiple times, it could be interpreted as disrespectful even.