I Don't Understand

Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't understand, you will let me know. That is much better than having someone who I have to poke to admit that they don't understand something.

Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that "This was my mistake". It is tempting to just fix the mistake but even if you have fixed it, if there isn't clear declared ownership, you probably haven't addressed the root cause.

Doing this keeps you honest to yourself and also removes the awkward air where no one knows who is responsible for this mistake because no one has taken ownership. To pull this off you need an environment that won't punish mistakes by default.

There are absolutely fireable mistakes but if you do this right, the employee should volunteer to be let go because he realizes the gravity of his error.

I can see why there seems to be a stigma attached to admitting you don't understand something, especially if you've just started at a new place and you want to make a good impression and reassure them they made the right choice hiring you. I've been guilty too many times of not speaking up when I don't understand something and it comes back to bite you. It makes you look more incompetent being ignorant and not speaking up and then ultimately failing to deliver, than it does to admit you don't understand something thus lowering expectations of the outcome from your work.

To be honest most senior developers are guilty of not creating the right kind of environments for people to comfortably admit they don't understand something and then it brings the whole team down as a result. With exception of where I work now, the senior developers at all other large companies I've worked at made you feel stupid for admitting you didn't understand. There's no weakness in admitting you don't understand, but because of the way companies these days throw words like Agile and lean around, it's no surprise people are afraid to speak up when a company works in the form of 3 week sprints.

While it comes down to the volatile environments managers and senior developers have created over the years, a bad economy doesn't exactly help when it comes to admitting you don't understand something you were hired to do either.

Unless you are supposed to know it.

The best new hires we've brought on are the ones that jump in and ask for explanations.

When explaining things to a new hire I already know they don't understand everything, and I expect questions. Those questions help drive the discussion further in a way that hopefully fits in better with their thought process/learning style.

It is much more frustrating trying to explain things to people that just nod and have to be continually questioned to try and find out what they actually understand!

My analysis professor used to say, if you state that some part of the proof is trivial then it should be easy to just write it out. And when you have a hard time writing it out or it takes too long, perhaps it's not trivial after all.