Asking the Right Way
28 Jan 2021
It doesn’t hurt to ask.. if you do it right
We live in a world where we have access to a plethora of information online. We can learn almost anything we want on the internet, for free. If you ask someone a question that you could’ve quickly figured out through a simple google search, that person may be reluctant to help you. You must display effort rather than seeming like you want to be spoon-fed answers. When it comes to software engineering, having questions is inevitable. You must ask questions the “smart” way so that you prevent annoying others by seeming lazy or uneducated.
In order to ask questions the “smart way”, you need to know how to ask correctly. Ask questions at the appropriate place, whether it be forums, emails, or anything else. Ensure that your questions are related to the overall conversation of the site where you’re asking. Use meaningful headers. Write clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language. Get to the point and be explicit about your question. Most importantly, show that you have made an effort to solve the problem before asking your question. People will be much more likely to help you if they see that you are willing to put in the effort to learn rather than just be fed answers.
Learn from the mistakes of others
We can see examples of not so smart questions vs. smart questions on one of the most popular question and answer resource for programmers, stackoverflow.
First, let us look at a not so smart question. Despite the fact that this person referred to their own question as a “stupid question,” it’s obvious just by looking at their only response that the person didn’t do enough of their own research before asking the question. The first thing that the response mentions is that they were able to search google to find the answer to the first question. This isn’t a good look for the original poster since it shows a lack of effort, and it seems they got lucky and were able to get an answer. It’s clear that not everyone was too happy about the apparent lack of effort since the post had three downvotes.
Next, let us look at a smart question. The original poster is asking a meaningful, clear, and explicit question. Furthermore, this person displays their efforts by mentioning what they tried to do to solve the problem and provides example codes. It is clear that this person has tried to solve their problem independently and needs a little extra help. When looking at the responses to the question, many of them are very detailed, and it seems like many people are willing to help. We can also infer by the sheer amount of upvotes and replies that this post received that most people responded positively to this post.
We can learn by these two examples that by putting in the effort and showing that you’re not lazy and just want answers, you’re much more likely to receive the help you desire. The not so smart question was lucky enough to receive a response, but it was only one response, and the post got three downvotes. On the other hand, the other person who displayed effort to solve their problem received thousands of upvotes with many detailed answers to their question.