I spend a lot of time in my role teaching. Either giving presentations, coaching persons, maybe even making videos on technical topics. And something super important I’ve learned in my career is that whenever I make a statement when explaining something, is that I’m probably wrong. In fact, I’ve started saying that at the beginning of my knowledge presentations. “Oh, and by the way, everything I’m about to tell you is wrong.”

Now I realize that’s inflammatory and click-baity, but let me explain.

Let’s say you’re doing a quick presentation on “How to patch a Red Hat server”. In fact, I just went and did a Google search on this, and sure enough the answer is what I would be tempted to say, namely “yum update”. But (and a lot of you might know this already), that answer is very possibly wrong.

Maybe the environment is using Satellite. Maybe it’s a laptop with no wifi. Maybe it’s running in a datacenter with no path to the Internet. Maybe you don’t have sudo rights. Maybe its actually an Ubuntu server.

(In retrospect, this is not the best example, but hopefully it’s enough to make my point. See, what I said is wrong already!)

My point is, you could say almost anything when trying to teach someone, and invariably they will come upon some alternative situation where what you taught them is wrong. Additionally, if you’re teaching a class there are persons sitting there that have experienced those alternative situations, and they are eager and excited to raise their hands and announce to the audience, “Well actually, you’re wrong, and here’s why…”

I think this is why so many experienced persons, when asked what seems like a simple question (“How do I patch a Red Hat server?”), instead of just answering (“sudo yum update”), they go, “Well, let’s take a step back. What’s really the situation?” Which, fascinatingly, can be just as frustrating for the question-asker because they are sitting there thinking “Doesn’t this person know what the command is to patch Red Hat?”. But the answer-er is sitting there thinking “There’s like 38 different possible answers depending on a number of factors. How do I gather more information to give them the best answer?”

In short, answering questions is hard.