Ask HN: How do you say “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you” confidently?

They key isn't how you say it, the key is that you consistently do it so that people learn that when you say it, you mean it.

1) Questions for which you can recall the answer off the top of the head, or by sharing an _existing_ note, document, link, etc.

2) "Questions" which cannot be immediately answered from memory / existing records, and are in fact a request to do _new work_, be it research, analysis, writing some document, etc. etc.

Hopefully, you are sufficiently well organized, keep notes, and anticipate obvious inquiries such that that many questions are of type #1. Think of those as L1 or L2 cache hits.

Then, for the remainder that are #2, you can say "sorry, I don't have anything to hand, haven't thought about that, but I could look into it and get back to you with something in X amount of time, if that's useful. should we create a ticket, and prioritize this alongside other priorities?".

The thing that will inspire confidence is not saying this all the time, but only for the non-#1 things, and that many things are #1 and get an immediate response.

It's also powerful to build these constructs into questions of other people. You could ask "Hey, Bob - I'm wondering, do you know, off the top of your head, where the code that does X is?".

Ideally, Bob can then say, "oh, yes, I was just looking at that yesterday, it's here: http://....", or alternatively "Hmm. Actually, no, sorry.".

An annoying non-answer would be "No, but it's probably in place X, because Y, or maybe it's Z, or it could be found using git history or blah blah blah..." - that's not helpful, because if it needs to _searched for_, you can do that just as well as Bob, the question was whether he had it _to hand_, not whether he could make some guesses about where it _could_ be...

Or if it's another developer and it would be useful: "I don't know, but let's find out." (and then we can look at the code together).