I Do Not Know Is the Most Useful Thing You Can Say

A mentee asks you something and you do not know the answer. There is a half second in there where you can feel yourself reaching for a substitute. A general principle that sounds wise. A confident it depends. A story from a previous job that sits near the question without ever landing on it.

Do not take the substitute. Say the short true thing. I do not know.

Then keep going, because on its own that is a dead end and somebody came to you for help. The part that matters is the sentence after it. I do not know, let us find out, and you can watch how I do it.

What happens next is one of the most useful half hours you will ever give them, and it has almost nothing to do with the answer. They see where you look first. They see you form a guess out loud and then go and test it rather than defend it. They see you read the actual source instead of the third search result. They see you abandon a route after four minutes because it was going nowhere. And they see the point at which you decide you are sure enough to act, which is a judgement nobody ever teaches and everybody needs.

They also learn something about the shape of a career. Junior people carry a quiet belief that senior means holding answers, and that the fog they are working in will burn off somewhere above them. It does not. The fog stays about the same thickness for the rest of your life. What changes is how calmly you work inside it and how quickly you find your footing. You cannot tell them that in a sentence. You can show them in an afternoon.

Two guardrails. Do not perform it. If you do know, answer, because pretending to be lost in order to teach is a game people see through and resent. And when you half know, say which half. I am sure about the retry behaviour, I am guessing about the timeout, let us check the second one.

Then close the loop. If you said you would find out, find out, and come back even when the answer turns out to be dull. Someone who says I do not know and then never returns has taught the wrong lesson entirely.

– Asael Shinder