Throughout high school and college years, every single one of us have listened to someone ask an easy question, and having to hear it again, but in a rephrased matter. These common sense and lack of detail questions are signs of laziness versus the smarter ones show more effort in learning. Asking stupid questions can lead to wasting other individuals’ time because they lack effort. You are more likely to get a useful response if you are specific about what help is needed. This will allow the people answering your question to focus their effort, time, and energy on something that came with more thought. In the programming world, we are all being introduced to new opportunities. Smart questions are important for software engineers because we are all racing against time to finish a program by a certain time or figure out why our codes are not working. These types of questions show responders that you have done the work on your own and hit a bump on the road, rather than feeling like you did not try at all.
In the Stack Overflow Bad Question Example Link , the person asking the question simply sounds like he is demanding an answer. He says “I need search box filter in javascript for these which search and filter each,” he then follows it with examples of words that he needs. This way of asking a bad question because it lacks information on what the guy wanted to find for his project. The person asking for help sounds like he is demanding an answer and expects an answer to be given to him, when in reality, someone could just skip is question and find someone else who sounded more polite. This clearly was not a smart question he user lacked details on what his assignment was about. To make this better, the user could have showed that he at least tried to figure out his problem by showing a few lines of code. This would have helped other users figure out his problem clearly.
In the Stack Overflow Good Question Example Link , this user also asks for help on how to use a search box, like the user in the bad question example. However, this user asks by saying “I have a list of filter buttons that filter gallery items. The filtering works well, and the filter state is saved in session storage. I’m trying to link up the search box and button.” He also discusses the behavior that he is trying to accomplish and his struggle to reach his goals. Along with these details, he also adds a snippet of his code. This is smart way to ask a question because of the amount of effort the user put into delivering his question. His details and examples of code allow other users to get a head start and understanding of where he is trying to get to.
From the article, “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way” by Eric Steven Raymond, I have learned that communication is really important, not only in software engineering, but also in reality. The way words and questions are phrased can show how much knowledge you have into something or how much effort you put into something. I will take this reading as a life lesson about critical thinking. I learned that if the question is too simple to ask, I probably did not work on the problem hard enough or think about what the answer should be. From now on, before I ask a question, I plan on working harder towards my goal, rather than just giving up mid way to ask a basic question.