Comment by Dylan16807
6 years ago
There's two parts to the problem. You don't want to sound mocking, but you also don't want to come across as a doofus who thinks their ten seconds of thought is automatically insightful, even as you're the twentieth person to suggest turning if off and on again.
When someone has been working on something for a week or more, a naive "What if we tried using sshd here?" fails that latter test pretty hard.
Perhaps.
But if I'm the proverbial twentieth person to ask the same question, it's probably a hint that it should be documented/explained prominently - maybe in a README, maybe as a comment in the source code, maybe some other suitable place.
And maybe it's just me. I'm a team lead and I have constant impostor syndrome. I was airborne into an existing team of junior devs who had no real team lead, but some of the devs know their stuff better than I do. E.g. I don't know modern ES, TypeScript, or React. I can't write CSS for the life of me. I'm mostly a back end Python/Django geek/Linux graybeard. I have since learned to not be afraid to sound like a doofus. I just ask away when I'm reviewing code and I don't understand something in modern ES/TypeScript/JSX/TSX/etc.
Like, if you are generally a nice guy, people you work with will eventually (and rather quickly) figure out that's just how you ask questions and don't mean any mockery.
> But if I'm the proverbial twentieth person to ask the same question, it's probably a hint that it should be documented/explained prominently
If you're joining a project, or it's published, sure.
If you're just having a conversation you don't start off by skimming a dozen pages of documentation. So put in a tiny amount of effort with your wording, to show you realize they might have thought of this already.