Asking the Real Questions
17 Jan 2019What is a “Smart” Question?
Eric Steven Raymond and Rick Moen’s “How To Ask Smart Questions” is an interesting article that explains what they believe is a “smart” question and how it helps to produce better answers. The article does a pretty good job of explaining how to build a smart question, specifically for a technical topic, as well as how and where to ask the question online. In summary, a smart question is one that is well researched, properly titled, gives others an adequate amount of information including symptoms and error messages using standard formatting, is asked on the correct forum, is grammatically correct, and sets an achievable and explicit goal.
Don’t be a Waste of Time
From what I understand, the main takeaway from this article seems to be “don’t waste anyone’s time when asking questions”. Whether it be your time or the time of others, asking questions in which the answer can easily be found or questions that show the laziness of the asker just waste the time of many different people. Wasting people’s time with bad questions will likely make them irritated with the one asking it and may lead to sarcastic or troll answers in an attempt to waste more of the asker’s time.
Example Questions
Example 1
This question is good because it poses an interesting question that is not quite obvious at first. At the same time, the question is very answerable, having someone come up with an answer that is both very clear and concise. The question is also very clear and the person asking the question clearly knows general information as well as what kind of answer they are looking for.
Example 2
This question is bad for multiple reasons. First off, it seems like a homework question that should be figured out on one’s own. It is also a question that can be answered incredibly easily using google. Many that replied to the question seem to understand that and took the time to say “Look it up on Google”. This kind of question is a huge waste of time for everyone as those that see the question have no need to answer and the one asking likely could have found the answer more quickly if they had done some research before posting the question.
