Comment by sytelus

These are the questions we call it the enumeration types. This means the answer to these questions requires scanning large number of options, sort them effectively and return top few choices. Ask someone what are your most favorite 10 movies and you will know how hard it is to answer these effectively and accurately.

Another thing is that much of the organizational memory these days is available electronically. When I join new team, I go through recent documents, slides, meeting notes, emails in internal discussions etc in first two days that is available to everyone in the team. I also learn building source code, looking at architecture/design docs, their evolution over time, release plans etc. After doing all these for first few days, it makes sense to ask specific questions as opposed to let me Google it for you questions and you would look prepared and worth spending time to talk details beyond giving elementary pointers.