A first year messaged me yesterday with a question about a closing set. It was a very basic question. My immediate internal reaction was basically, how do you not know this?
Then about five seconds later I remembered asking almost the exact same question as a first year.
I even remembered who I asked. I remember staring at the Teams message for ten minutes before sending it because I was convinced the senior would think I was an idiot. She answered in about two sentences, explained why we did it that way, and I never had to ask again.
Yesterday I almost responded to this junior with just "yes" because I was busy and slightly annoyed. Instead I gave him the two-sentence explanation. The entire exchange probably cost me an additional 45 seconds.
Kind of embarrassed by how close I was to forgetting all of that.
I'm a senior now, so a lot of things that used to require actual thought have become completely automatic. I know which precedent to pull, who needs to be copied, what the partner actually means when she says "take a look," which things can go directly to the client, which things absolutely cannot, etc. It becomes very easy to mistake "I've done this 80 times" for "this is obvious."
And then we complain that juniors don't ask questions.
Obviously there are bad questions. If I sent you the answer three emails ago and you didn't read it, that's different. But I think I've started mentally putting way too many normal beginner questions into the "you should know this" bucket.
The weird part of getting more senior is realizing that being good at the job can make you worse at remembering what learning the job actually felt like.
Curious if anyone else has caught themselves doing this.