Should I ask the question again, differently?

Question

I wrote this question: Is it common for new employees to be appointed to a team in a higher position than the current technical lead? Is there a term for this?

At first, I was not planning on attaching that question to any specific situation; I wanted a more general response. It got a lot of interesting responses, but a lot of people are asking for more information or context. I feel like this question has gotten a life of its own the way it is and if I added context of a specific situation to that question, it would probably require a change to most answers and comments...

The main thing I want to add is somewhere along the lines of what I wrote in my last comment:

seems everyone automatically assumes that either the team lead is lesser skilled than the new individual or the company is trying to get rid of the team lead in some way. what if that's not the case? what if the team lead is actually technical lead for very good reasons? or what if the company wants to keep the team lead in the company?

I am wondering should I start another question, just with a lot more context? Or should I update/add to the existing question?

Answer 1

Your additional information doesn't add anything significant enough to warrant creating a new question. If I were an answerer, I would challenge your assertions that the technical lead is more skilled than the new hire. That is your assessment, which is likely to be biased, particularly if you are the team lead. Clearly management somehow values the new hire more than the previous, otherwise there wouldn't be the disparity.

Part of the problem with hypothetical questions is that without a real situation to act as context, you can always respond to any answer with "But what if that's not the case? What then?" At a certain point, the only possible answer is "We can't read minds - you should ask management why they did what they did."

If you want to improve your question, you would be better off just asking about what your actual situation is, rather than using vague hypotheticals. Are you the team lead and you want to know how to approach management about feeling undervalued? Are you one of the team members and are trying to figure out how to deal with a power struggle between the lead and the new hire? Are you a manager and are trying to determine if it's acceptable to bring in a new person at a higher level than your team lead? Tell us what your real problem is instead of making us try to guess.

Answer 2

Generally speaking: you want to avoid being overly vague in cases where you're dealing with a specific situation. Vague means no one is clear on the situation. As soon as you start talking in "what if" scenarios you start to lose people. And then when people answer the general question, it's kind of annoying if you were to chime in with "but actually [thing that I didn't mention] means this won't work for me".

That said, standard procedure for updating a question is to edit it, unless any edit would drastically invalidate existing answers that have value. In rare cases you'd ask the question again. And that's so rare that it's safe to assume that you're not in that situation. Typically we recommend getting feedback on chat or meta in case you want to post a new question about a similar topic. (Like you're doing now.)