Editing a draft is easier than creating from scratch. If you ask an expert open ended questions, you are creating a lot of work for them. But if you take a stab and ask for feedback, that’s much easier.
> If you ask an expert open ended questions, you are creating a lot of work for them.
True, but my questions were pretty direct, and black and white.
> But if you take a stab and ask for feedback, that’s much easier.
That's true in that it's showing that I'm attempting to solve a problem, etc. However, for the scenario with this team, the work involved in answering was the same before and after. These weren't open ended issues.
The questions were typically "Should I do A or B?" Eventually, with no response, I'd announce "I'm going with C" where C is clearly wrong. I always then got emails telling me which of A or B was correct.
Oh, and I didn't ask for feedback. I learned that would not elicit a response. Just a straight up "FYI, this is the plan and I've begun execution." That led to urgency in responding.
No one could complain they didn't have a heads up as I often had weeks of unanswered queries to refer them to.
As I said: Crappy thing to have to do, but this was one team where more reasonable approaches just weren't working.
I had the experience in the other direction. I was in a team of experts (me not being one of them). My work required occasionally consulting them for their expertise (i.e. I was not expected to become deeply knowledgeable in that domain). Whenever I'd ask a question, I'd either get no response, or a quick, short response that was either incomplete, didn't address at all what I was asking, or plainly wrong given the context.
I got quite frustrated and eventually had to resort to the tactic your parent talked about: When I wouldn't get a proper answer, I would send an "update" laying out the course of action I was about to take - and it was clearly the incorrect one. Suddenly I'd get a lot of useful responses explaining why what I was doing was wrong and how to do it properly.
So yes - this is a bad tactic to do in general, but there are times when it's called for. If you're in a team where you feel the need to do this, find another job. I did as soon as I completed the project.