I’m sure everyone who has asked a question asking for help has heard the phrase “there are no dumb questions”. Now, while I believe that to be sure, that does not mean there are not any smart questions. I learned this from reading Eric Raymond’s essay about how to ask smart questions. He provides interesting insight on certain things you can do before and when you ask a question. The goal he tries to get people to do is to develop a question that will make it easier for the person that will answer the question to understand and know that you will understand the answer they give. Key things to consider when trying to ask a smart question is to try search for the answer by any means necessary and if that does not work then to be as clear and informative as you can. It only makes it harder for the person looking at your question to give an answer so they will most likely ignore the question.
As software engineers, asking smart questions will help us use our time more effectively and give us clear helpful answers to our questions. Programming can be a much more difficult language to communicate through to others than English if we do not clearly state what the goal of the code is supposed to do and where the problems lie in the code. Smart software engineers will ask smart questions because they know it is the best way to get a valuable response in the quickest way possible. Below I will show you examples of both a smart question and a not so smart question.
I will show you an example of a smart question that was asked on a popular forum for programmers called Stack Overflow. The question the person asks is “Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array. The asker states the language the code is in as well as the problem he is having with his code. The asker then displays his whole code and, in more detail, shows the exact outputs he is getting. The asker then showed what he had tried to do to fix the problem by doing it in a different language and then stating what he thought was going on within the code. This is a good example of a smart question because it shows he tried to solve the problem he was getting as well as being clear and detailed with the question and problems he was having. This of course resulted in the asker getting plenty of feedback from the community which ended up helping him figure out the issue.
This next question is an example of a not so smart question. The asker basically just states that he is getting errors from his code, posts the errors and then says, “help me to fix it”. The asker does not give much helpful information and does not explain well the issue he is having. He puts it in the hands of the answerer to figure out what is even going on or give any information on what the asker has already tried to fix the problem but failed to do so. The result of this question was that nobody gave him an answer and the asker was not able to get the answer he wanted because he did not try to give a smart question.
It was quite a realization putting myself in the shoes of an answerer. Only then was I able to see how I would want someone to ask me a question. I did not realize how easy it was to spot smart questions and not so smart questions and how visible the results were between the two. It will make me think twice about how I should ask a question if I ever need help. It also made me believe I might not even have to ask a question because there are tons of resources that have answers already given if you just put in the time and effort.