[sarchertech]

Junior engineers might be doing some of the actual work, but by the nature of being junior tend to lack any context around how their work fits into or impacts the overall system. Mix that with being too green to feel confident pushing back at all, and you get someone who will say yes to nearly any question you ask them.

“Hey junior front end engineer, how long will it take you to change that passcode from 4 digits to 6?”

The junior responds with “There’s nothing to it. A day tops.”

But the junior doesn’t realize that the devices that are integrated with the system are statically allocating memory to hold that passcode and can’t change the length without shipping new firmware.

Of course that kind of thing can happen when asking a more senior person as well but it’s much, much less likely.

[2C64]

Exactly this. Context is king - and as someone else stated below knowing how to get to the actual ask vs. how the ask is being phrased is something that comes with experience.

That said, it should also be the role of the more senior technical leadership to involve junior technical staff in the process so they have the opportunity to grow. For example, CEO asks CTO how long it would take to add X feature so CTO loops a junior engineer into the conversation and demonstrates how to get to what the CEO is actually asking (which may or may not be X) vs. just providing a time estimate for X feature. Hopefully the CEO learns something here too but ymmv.