“Ah, there it is, there it is, Chief,” cried all the others. “There’s the point. No one’s got a clearer head than you. You couldn’t have made it plainer.”
— Lewis, C.S.. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
In the world of programmers, people who always say “yes” are not liked.
“You can do it for tomorrow?” — “Sure.”
“That library is tested?” — “Yes.”
“All bugs are gone?” — “Yes.”
“You know how to do this?” — “Yes.”
“It will work this way?” — “Sure.”
You cannot work with a person who only agrees. A good teammate must ask questions, must sometimes say something is wrong, that it needs another way. Young people maybe don’t know this yet. Older ones already do. We need honesty, openness, sometimes proactivity — like, “hey, this algorithm looks risky, let’s talk about it.”
We need more answers like:
“How to do it?” — “I don’t know, let’s read.”
“Is this good?” — “I don’t know, let’s add logs and check.”
“Anything else?” — “I don’t know, let’s see, I will check.”
Why I write this? Because anyone who worked with AI knows:
They don’t know how to do this yet.
They are terrible yes-sayers.
So we must not say, “do this like that…”
We must say, “ask me for the next steps to do this like that…” Or “explain to me with details how to do this like that…”
We have to teach our electronic helper to ask questions — otherwise it will make mistakes, and sometimes it will proactively hide mistakes and problems from us.
Yes!