To get a good, useful, and smart answer to your question, you have to pose your question in a certain way. You can’t expect someone to give you the answer you need when you’ve asked your question in a very poorly formatted way.
It also does not help if you haven’t researched the web before posing your question somewhere, as people usually tend to be more helpful towards question-askers who show that they have really made an effort to get their question answered, but they simply couldn’t find an answer, yet.
There are quite some guidelines for posing your question in a smart way. If you ever plan on coming across as a good question-asker when posing a question, I’d highly recommend that you read the essay “How to ask questions the smart way” by Eric Raymond.
In this essay, Raymond provides guidelines for effective interaction with the open source community. In this essay, I’ll show you what happens when you pose a question according to these guidelines, and what happens when you don’t! Spoiler alert: it is better to pose a question according to these guidelines.
For the purpose of this essay I have looked up a ‘smart question’ and a ‘stupid question’ on Stack Overflow. We’ll start off with a question that is posed in the right way. The question is posed as the following: “Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array?”
The user then provides a snippet of code that is relevant to their question, data that gives relevant information about the question, such as the times of the different processes. Thus, the user gave all the relevant information to show what his question was about. However, this is not yet a perfect question, there is more to it. The user then shows that they have taken initiative in trying to solve the problem on their own, in this case by trying to run the code in a different coding language. They provided the code to that as well, and they state that the question remains. They also state different possible causes of the problem that they have considered already, and the question still has not been solved.
This question is a perfect example of a ‘smart question’: it is stated in a proper way, the user shows that they have done their research and tried to solve it on their own, and they suggest different causes that they have considered already. By posing a question this way, it invites other users to help them out because they have shown that they really want to understand and solve their question, not just get someone else to do their work. The answers definitely show that people are eager to help if a question is posed in a smart way. The highest up-voted reply is a very detailed answer to the question that is posed. It gives good examples and explains it in ‘simple terms’ before explaining it in more complex terms. It is a smart answer to a smart question.
I also found a question that was not posed in the smart way, according to Raymond’s guidelines. This user posed the following question: “What’s the difference between JavaScript and Java?“.
In Raymond’s essay, one of the guidelines is that you have to show that you have done your research before asking your question. It appears that this user hasn’t. The question is single-lined, there is no description of the work they have done to try and get the question answered, and they show no possible considered solutions to the question.
This question is a clear example of someone who hasn’t put in any effort to get it solved. Everyone knows that you can google this question and browse the web for a little, and you’ll get an understanding of the difference between Javascript and Java. If you still have a question then, you could pose a more detailed question about the certain subject that is still unclear to you. It is clearly shown in the answers that the users of Stack Overflow think that the question-poser should’ve done a little research before just jumping to asking questions. The most up-voted reply is: “Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet are similar.” This answer doesn’t answer the question at all, and most of the answers to this question are sarcastic like this one.
As is shown by the two examples I gave above, asking a question in the smart way will increase your chances of getting a helpful answer, a lot. It is very important for software engineers to pose questions in the smart way, because you will gain a lot more knowledge that way. By asking smart questions, you give yourself the opportunity to learn about your question, because you’ve researched, tried different possible solutions, and understand your question in a very detailed way. This allows you to pose the question in a very detailed way. This way, when someone answers your question, you will really learn from it because it will click more in your brain as to why it works this certain way. By asking smart questions, you really give yourself the chance to learn.