Be Smart Ask Smart
07 Sep 2017Introduction
With obesity rates rising rapidly in America it is no surprise that majority of the people you come across are gluttons. The internet is no different, with over 90% of questions posted are from people who love to be spoon fed answers. For software engineering, you will see that forums are littered with questions that are not asked in a manner where the problem is easy to identify and answer with precision. In “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way” Eric Raymond, states that such questions are unlikely to be met with an adequate answer. So how does one seek help and receive what they’re looking for?
How Not To
Before seeking help from others it is important to try and answer the question yourself first. You can often find answers to problems by doing a simple search as it is rare that the problems you stumble across are unique to yourself, meaning you will often find answers online. If that does not work out, you may want to try reading the manual or looking through FAQs. If you have to resort to asking another person it is important to show that you’ve done the steps previously mentioned. In this example you can see that the question is immediately met with comments stating to show that the poster has done work before hand. Also, the headline question is asked in such a way that it appears that the poster just wants to be given an answer instead of learning and understanding how their question is answered.
How To
Contrast to the previous example the correct way to ask a question would be to show that you’ve tried to solve it yourself, state what you did and show the result of what you did. It is also important to title your questions with a object deviation. In this example we can see that the question is headed correctly and that the poster has shown that he/she has made an attempt to solve it themselves first. The comments received in this post offered more insight on the problem, such that the person was able to find a solution.
Conclusion
Asking questions requires a level of finnese that many people lack. In order to save your audience’s and your own time it is important to learn how to properly ask questions that meet the standard that software engineers deem worthy of an answer. Concise questions are likely to be answered concisely, whereas vague questions asked by babies who want to be spoon fed are unlikely to feedback let alone a response.