Asking Smart Questions
26 Jan 2017Smart Questions
This may surprise people who have never programmed, but quite a large percentage of a programmer’s time is spent googling, searching, reading, and even asking for answers. Any person that has spent some chunk of time programming, however, fairly quickly comes to the realization that googling and searching skills are absolutely vital to being a competent programmer. Programming is such an incredibly broad field, with numerous languages and frameworks to learn and each with their own sets of functions, rules, and quirks. Even if you’ve programmed in a language consistently for years, it is still common to forget the name of a function or be unable to figure out why your program is behaving a certain way. Or alternatively, maybe you are working on a complex algorithm and your outputs are all incorrect and you can’t for the life of you figure out why. This is where your search skills come in. If you want to be a competent and productive worker, however, it isn’t enough to just simply search or ask for something. It all comes down to understanding the problem and knowing what to ask and how to ask it. In other words, asking smart questions.
Smart Question
Above is an example of a smart question, and it happens to be smart in multiple ways. First off, the title is adequately descriptive. It states the object that is the source of the problem and what he wanted to accomplish with it. Because of this, anybody scrolling through the various questions immediately knows what the poster is asking. By being descriptive, the poster ensures that it gets the attention of people who may have something to offer and raises the chances of getting the correct answer to the question. It also has the secondary effect of popping up in search engines when someone else asks the same or a similar question. While this doesn’t benefit the poster directly, it shows the connection between googling and asking the question on a forum yourself. If you know what to ask and how to ask it, then you will find the answer you’re looking for more quickly.
Additionally, the content of the post demonstrated that the poster had some knowledge of the problem at hand and attempted to understand it. This is a positive because most of the people who are taking their time to answer these questions don’t wanna just spoonfeed you and complete your homework/work for you, but genuinely want to help you reach that eureka moment where you have a complete understanding of the problem at hand. Also, if you don’t take the time to understand a problem then you aren’t improving your critical thinking skills and only hurting yourself. Due to everything stated above, people took their time to write substantial posts with correct answers. If the poster had framed his/her question poorly and/or had not even attempted to figure things out on his own, then the correct answer may not have been given and people wouldn’t have taken the time to help.
Bad Question
While the above was only posted shortly before this essay was made, which means that people wouldn’t have had the time to respond yet, I do believe it is a good example of not asking smart questions. Let’s start which the title, which is a good example of not writing a question correctly. While people who understand Qt will be able to grasp the gist of the problem, it could’ve been reworded. Now onto the meat of the problem, which is the actual content of the post. The poster pretty much violates every rule here by asking the community to just straight up give him the answer to everything he asks without even demonstrating that he attempted the problem himself. S/he posted zero code, and after the first response was a link to creating a proper post on stack overflow, the poster replied that no code was required. That, combined with the end of the original post, also made the poster come off as whiny and needy. It does seem possible that English is not the poster’s native language, which means that the post should’ve been prefaced with this fact if that’s the case. The second reply happened to be a link to a similar post, and this post happened to be another example of asking smart questions. It had a better title with code inside and text that showed the poster tried to figure it out on their own. As expected, the post was met with a good reply (and additional follow-up replies after) where people were willing to continue helping the poster find the solution. The post was good enough that I thought of replacing the above smart question, but I thought it would be best to show two good examples.
Summary
All in all, the above examples proved how critical it is to ask the right questions. It can be the difference between figuring out your problem or getting nowhere. There are a ton of people out there who thrive on helping people and solving tough problems, but you have to meet them halfway.