>and they know it's a judgement free zone.

that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that.

If some underling somewhere says something that exposes their ignorance or naivety to either a policy problem or a technical problem you'd better realize that it's going to trigger a 'review mechanism' somewhere down the road within the organization; to think otherwise would be pure fantasy.

Similarly : if you go drinking with the boss, you do still have to remember that the drunk puking slob who you're carrying to their hotel room is going to wake up and be your boss tomorrow.

very few humans actually disconnect this stuff from their internalized judgements of people.

> that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that.

I am surprised that I had to scroll this far to find this observation. If I see a person's posts in multiple channels, I don't switch ON and OFF my mental image of them based on channel like a SQL where clause where channel <> personal. Based on the same premise, the person posting also probably knows this fact and isn't going to be totally free and relaxed asking whatever comes to their mind due to fear of judgement - the same eyeballs are going to be looking at the posts, irrespective of the type of channel.

As someone posted elsewhere, it is all going to be cultural and if that is right, it pretty much doesn't matter how you structure channels.

Yeah, maybe I’m small-minded, but if someone I’m not familiar with, say a new hire asks a question way beneath their presumed experience level I’m absolutely gonna judge, judgement free be damned; and if they’re my report I’m gonna question the hiring (in my mind). There’s no shortage of imposters in the industry, most of them who’re capable of landing jobs above them are probably also smart enough to scoff at pure fantasy like “judgement free zone”.

Having spent a long time in tech and worked with a lot of people I've realised there are two sorts of people who are "imposters". There are those who have BS'd their way up and are in a role where they're out of their depth, and there are those who were lucky to have landed a role that's a bit beyond them (often because they have deep experience elsewhere.)

The first type don't ask questions. They know they're imposters and don't want to be called out.

The second type do ask questions. They also know they're imposters but they're trying to learn so they're not.

Judge people on their actions else you'll only spot the second group, and often with a bit of support those ones can go on to do great things, especially if they're experienced at one thing but they're not learning a new thing. When they get enough knowledge to connect the two things they can be absolutely brilliant.

There's no such thing as a judgment free zone when humans are involved :-)

I tell new hires that they shouldn't be scared of asking questions, and that if they're not asking questions they're probably not pushing themselves enough. But also caution to make sure that they check available resources first, and then ask the right audience.

In work and job markets like this.

You got to be really careful.

If there's a lot of jobs and a lot of market opportunity and a lot of demand for talent, then workplaces can be like this.

I'm afraid that with AI, one of these types of things are simply gone.

I'm a tech lead and I also tried to encourage the judgement free zone on the devs channel. I do this by intentionally asking question that I should know the answer to but don't as I just never got around to figuring it out as I have 16k other things to worry about. So rather than spend 2 hours chasing something down, I just ask. I know that this is a question a lot of juniors can answer. I avoid people thinking I am dumb by also taking time to answer the more technical questions and posting architecture and optimizations on the same channel.

This is going to depend a lot on culture.

This strikes me as a somewhat unfair characterization of many of these communities. In my experience, a much more common issue is that the people who do have answers end up ignoring the group and it becomes pointless. It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.

People who are likely to judge people for dumb questions are rarely involved in those groups in the first place, for exactly all the obvious reasons.

The more realistic outcome isn’t that your boss ends up a drunk puking slob (and for what it’s worth most of these groups don’t include leadership anyway, so not sure why anyone's boss would be involved) but that an intern floats a terrible idea ("I'm thinking of taking these 10 shots of 151"), nobody responds, they take silence as approval, and they end up causing a mess and then being judged for the mess they caused.

A quick gut check from them with a healthy group might get a few eye rolls and a "here's why that's a bad idea", but not any lasting judgement unless they completely ignored the advice.

The only case I can think of where that might happen is if they already did something which has policy or legal implications ("hey i accidentally dumped the whole user base including PII to my phone"), in which case - good? There should be a review mechanism, including consequences if they ignored a bunch of roadblocks.

> It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.

Yeah, the incentive structure for something like this is totally misaligned for this to work effectively in many cases outside of a very small, tight-knit team. (In which case... why the formality in the first place?)

For the "juniors": Why waste time digging through documentation, searching, or thinking--I can just post and get an answer with less effort.

For the "seniors": I'm already busy. Why waste time answering these same questions over and over when there's no personal benefit to doing so?

Sure, there are some juniors that will try and use it as a last resort and some seniors that will try their best to be helpful because they're just helpful people... but I usually see the juniors drowned out by those described above and the experts turn into those described above.

I think we _could_ come up with something that better aligned incentives though. Spitballing--

Juniors can ask a question. Once a senior answers, the junior then takes responsibility for making sure that question doesn't need to be answered there again--improving the documentation based on that answer. Whether that's creating new documentation, adding links or improving keywords to help with search, etc. That change then gets posted for a quick edit/approval by the senior mainly to ensure accuracy.

Now we're looking at something more like:

For the "juniors": If I ask a question, I will get an answer but it will create additional work on my end. If I ask something already answered in the documentation that I could have easily found, I basically have to publicly out myself as not having looked when I can't propose an improvement to the documentation. And that, fairly, is going to involve some judgement.

For the "seniors": Once I answer a question, someone is going to take responsibility for getting this from my head into documentation so I never need to answer this again.

This has an added benefit of shifting some of the documentation time off of the higher paid, generally more productive employees onto the lower paid, less productive employees and requiring them to build out some understanding in order to put it into words. It may also help produce some better documentation because stuff that a senior writes is more often going to assume knowledge that stuff a junior writing may think to explain because _they_ didn't know it. It also means that searching in the Slack/other channel, any question you find should end up with a link to the documentation where it's been answered which should help you discover more adjacent documentation all of which should be the most up-to-date and canonical answer we have.

I’m on board with the overall point, though I’d actually flip the logic in this section:

> Once a senior answers, the junior then takes responsibility for making sure that question doesn't need to be answered there again.

That might make sense for simple questions. But for anything more complex, especially when the issue stems from something you have control over, having senior folks take ownership might make more sense. If they can tie the fix to visible impact, there’s a strong incentive for them to actually solve the root problem. Otherwise, there’s always the risk that experienced team members simply ignore the question 100% of the time (which also solves the problem of "i've already answered this question").

One way seniors might approach these types of groups is by treating them as a source of ideas. Repeated questions like “how do I use X?” might indicate that X needs a redesign or better onboarding. An experienced corporate climber could treat those questions as justification for "X 2.0 which is way easier to onboard to" and get backing to work on it.

Anyone who’s spent time at a large tech company has likely seen this dynamic play out, because it’s a common pathway to promotion. Definitely taken to problematic extremes, no doubt, but a slightly-healthier version of that playbook still beats the alternative of relying on the arcane knowledge of a select few as gatekeepers of information.

As a senior judgement is a real problem as others have suggested. I suspect its a reason why AI is popular. I can ask those dumb questions I should know without embarrassing myself by asking someone, or even worse put it in writing with my name on it.