Reminds me of Josh Waitzkin's concept of "investment in loss". Such a great and rewarding approach if you are able to suspend your ego and practice it.
Willingness to look stupid
591–600 of 811 posts
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the best people I've ever worked with used this approach. "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, ." were two phrases she used all the time . I am surprised at how difficult it has been to emulate her technique. Feeling comfortable asking the obvious questions is one half of the battle, but the other, more difficult half, is knowing what obvious questions to ask. Mo…
VP in my org does this, and it really disarms the room. She’s big on that exact phrase of “this could be a really stupid question, but…” She’s also really good about making sure other people are rewarded for doing the same by reassuring someone asking what might be a dumb question as, “that’s a a great question and I’m sure others were wondering the same…” before responding. Great leadership, IMO.
I would honestly take a hefty payout to work for this person.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#593[deleted]
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#594Re: Willingness to look stupid
#595One important point made is that leaders should build environments where people aren't afraid to look stupid. I worked at a place where a senior developer would laugh after "winning" an argument with me[1]. I have to say that's the only work environment where I wanted to punch a member of my team. It was also the environment least conducive to dialogue and learning. Even if you're right and the person is genuinely being stupid, you don't need to rub it in. Chances are they'll already feel stupid from their own judgement.
[1]: A lot of our arguments boiled down to us debating stuff where neither of us knew what we were talking about, but I was the only one willing to admit that.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#596One way to prove that he truly doesn't mind looking stupid would be to list times when he risked looking stupid... and it turns out he actually was. It's happened to all of us though we dont like to admit it. I'm sure it's happened to him too and I looked but I didn't see any of those examples listed. Giving only examples of when people thought he was dumb and it turned out he wasn't... that's kind of just a roundabo…
The entire post is peak /r/iamverysmart material and I'm not surprised it is popular here because a lot of the HN crowd fits into that category as well.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever new people join the team, I always say, "Please ask stupid questions. I mean questions so stupid that you might think we would question why we hired you, because you think we think you should already know. Ask those types of really stupid basic questions. It will educated you, make us think, and I'm certain at least one other person already on the team doesn't know either."
I usually say, "please ask stupid questions, because if you don't then you'll run off in the wrong direction and work on the wrong thing for a week before the next review, and you'll have wasted a lot of project budget." At my work, there's a bad combo of senior folks who whip off vague instructions in a single sentence, and junior folks who are afraid to ask questions. I'm in the middle, and I try hard to demonstrat…
Please, please keep doing this and encouraging this behavior. The more senior on the ic track you get the harder it is to find time to mentor. The reality is that is a core tenet of our position and we may be staying silent to not smother the room. If you need help and you have a competent senior they should encourage your questions or delegate to an appropriate senior if they are too busy.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#598There are three things in tension here.
1. It is usually combinatorially impossible to answer all the questions when solving a problem - people just choose some random walk over the problem space and it doesn't always lead to ideal results.
2. It is socially unacceptable for "senior" people (who usually have better mental model of higher level concerns) not to project smug confidence in front of less "senior" people, so they pretend to know things they do not.
3. People have evolved to be lazy as fuck, so unless they absolutely must know something and can't do without it, they mostly won't even bother. Some won't bother even _if_ they can't do without.
I don't have solutions to #1 and #3, and I doubt #3 can even be solved at all. But I do have a solution for #2 - it's the Socratic method (or as they call it at Microsoft "precision questioning"). It lets you save face by asking pointed, outcome-oriented questions of someone who likely knows more about the problem, without necessarily making your own lack of knowledge obvious. Besides that it also surfaces the assumptions, some of which routinely turn out to be wrong, and it's the easiest method I know for getting people to change their mind on things, because they feel like they've arrived at the answers using "their own" thought process. It is difficult to master, so it too runs into #3, however, but I think all engineers, senior and junior would benefit from learning this. Another upside of learning it is it makes it harder for unscrupulous others to manipulate you maliciously via Socratic questioning, since you know what they're trying to do.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#599There was a foreign student in my CS classes who asked lots of questions at the end of class while everybody rolled their eyes because they wanted to leave. I assumed he was having issues with the language barrier or was just slow.
Turns out he was the top student in the program and I would guess this was due in part to his willingness to ask questions and lack of fear in asking them in front of a room. He helped me get through an Operating Systems course the next semester.
More importantly, he showed a young me that asking questions is actually a sign of maturity and intellectual honesty and that what the peanut gallery thinks is of little consequence. That lesson has served me well in the last decade. He's now a PhD at a major research university and a close friend.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#600Here is my situation. You decide if I’m stupid. We’re evaluating an alternate database for our product already on prod. I sat in along with my manager for meeting with 5 folks from mongodb. They presented the annual cost for a licensed usage of mongodb enterprise for 500 gigs of ram at $132k annually. So my question in the end was - “If I were to simply install mongodb on our server with more than 500gigs of ram allocated across the mongo cluster by aws, how would you police us down for the extra usage? Is your server recording ram usage and sending it back to you?” Everyone was silent and the account t manager from mongo said : “Well it’s an honour system, we trust a big company such as yourself to use the product accordingly , we don’t police or check”, my manager followed up with a jovial remark “I don’t know why you ask such questions “. End of the day, I felt super stupid. Point being - I’m not a hidden genius or anything, sometimes I just ask in haste without thinking through.