> A culture where people are afraid of asking questions is worse than having the best possible documentation on everything.
No doubt.
However, my answer was to someone talking about people expecting to be spoon-fed in meetings, not just asking questions about some points they don't understand / can't find specifics for / etc.
The dynamic is very different. Asking questions is active. You read, try to understand, realize you don't. You then form a question and ask it. Contrast this with someone who just expects a laundry list of actions. "Just tell me what to do [step by step]".
My answer was also from experience in companies where even people with seniority and who had been there for quite a while will expect a checklist-like procedure to do things, and hardly attempt to actually understand their tools.
I get that the mental model of some tooling is not always self-evident, to say the least. But it's clear to me when someone tries to understand it and fails, and when someone doesn't even try. And I'm talking about tools they use day in, day out. They just learn to click that button and to expect that result. When something goes wrong, they have no idea what may have happened. I suspect this may also be somewhat related with the discussion on HN the other day about error codes [0], as in they get so used to cryptic, vague or downright wrong error messages that they just don't pay attention to them anymore – because 9 times out of 10 it's a waste of time.
No doubt.
However, my answer was to someone talking about people expecting to be spoon-fed in meetings, not just asking questions about some points they don't understand / can't find specifics for / etc.
The dynamic is very different. Asking questions is active. You read, try to understand, realize you don't. You then form a question and ask it. Contrast this with someone who just expects a laundry list of actions. "Just tell me what to do [step by step]".
My answer was also from experience in companies where even people with seniority and who had been there for quite a while will expect a checklist-like procedure to do things, and hardly attempt to actually understand their tools.
I get that the mental model of some tooling is not always self-evident, to say the least. But it's clear to me when someone tries to understand it and fails, and when someone doesn't even try. And I'm talking about tools they use day in, day out. They just learn to click that button and to expect that result. When something goes wrong, they have no idea what may have happened. I suspect this may also be somewhat related with the discussion on HN the other day about error codes [0], as in they get so used to cryptic, vague or downright wrong error messages that they just don't pay attention to them anymore – because 9 times out of 10 it's a waste of time.
[0] What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27443519