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Comment by Danieru | Hacker News Reader

Questioning everything also gets you stuck in bed asking why the sky is a different shade of blue.

Others might have accepted the unknown and ate breakfast.

Personally, I find pithy comebacks like this to sound convincing to but to actually be mostly devoid of utility. They tend operate as a sort of social persuasion tool, but I'd like to Get Things Done, which requires deep domain knowledge.

One thing I've been noticing with my current clients is the vast amount of churn generated by them only having a patchwork understanding of their overall architecture. Some grok the low-level infra, some the deployment levels, others the backend pieces, and others the frontend stuff. However, since there is no story collecting the pieces into a cohesive whole, we see them treadmilling through different tech stacks in an attempt to gain "velocity". They're definitely running fast; it's just they're not getting anywhere very quickly.

It's a pattern I see a lot. On the flipside, when clients have devs who mostly grok the entirety of their system, then we can focus on the questions that really matter: purpose, market fit, empirical evidence from users, _etc._

Questioning things costs time right now, not questioning costs 10 times that in the future.

> It's a pattern I see a lot. On the flipside, when clients have devs who mostly grok the entirety of their system, then we can focus on the questions that really matter: purpose, market fit, empirical evidence from users, _etc._

So uh, not questioning everything eh...

Sounds like you agree with me. That questions should be reserved for the meaningful and insightful.

See, that’s the kind of social pressure I was talking about.

And that's probably healthy for society to have a check. If the questions about the sky keep the questioner in bed they might not do the things they need to ensure their continued existence. In one respect that might be food but in a business that would be delivering change or supporting the business.

Another example: as a child you understand what + means and take it for granted. As part of Maths undegrad you start understanding the type of operators and the axioms of maths. The child was perfectly find completing maths problems without that depth.

Ah you went there eh. Yeah an alternative form on my reply would have been to point out that kids are the ones who question everything. Adults learn to identify the questions which will expand knowledge, and ask those.

asking why the sky is blue when you don’t know is perfectly fine and even admirable when everyone else seems to know and you don’t. i would expect such a person to at least try some research first and then share what they learned and what questions they still have, but if someone is asking earnestly and i have time, then why shouldn’t i help?

i don’t thjnk the logical extreme you position here is correct; if it’s an interest for the person why shouldn’t they pursue it? questioning everything for me is just getting to the point that it’s not magic anymore.

i probably don’t need to know the entire kernel code base to figure out why my eth0 won’t stay up. it might help a bit to know some of it if i’m getting weird kernel-ey messages in the logs.

The question was not "why is the sky blue", but "why is the sky a different shade of blue".

Every day the sky will be slightly different. There exists a reason why, and given effort you could identify the differences and relations.

Or you could go to work.

So... stopping. Not questioning everything eh.

My approach is to just question everything "else" where there is a chance I might be able to do something about it. This is why I'm not popular because I don't have much interesting trivia for party conversations. But I already have come to terms with that. This doesn't help with staying up late though.

This is exactly the kind of "Sarcastic comment by arrogant developer" that the article mocks.

Not a drop of sarcasm. Perhaps you should question why you mistook wisdom for comedy?

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