Have you ever heard someone say, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question”? Eric Raymond might beg to differ—and he has some good points to support his view, especially in the world of software engineering. While you may often find yourself coding on your own, programmers, like workers in any profession, are typically part of a team working towards a common goal. But how are you supposed to understand that goal, seek help, or assist others if you can’t communicate effectively? You can’t. Communication is a crucial skill for everyone. The better you can communicate with others, the more likely they will understand the point—or even the question—you are trying to convey. In this essay, we will explore what it means to ask a question the “smart” way versus the “not-so-smart” way.
Someone may ask, “What is a smart question?” According to Eric Raymond, a good question possesses some of the following qualities: clearly stating the problem, describing the symptoms you’re encountering, providing relevant background information (such as the type of machine, platform, or application), explaining the steps you’ve already tried, and showing evidence of your own research and efforts to understand the problem. Here is an example of a “smart question” from StackOverflow for you to review.
In this example, the person asking the question is having trouble with HTML—specifically, placing a heading (<h5>) inside a <summary> tag without disrupting the arrow icon. The user starts by explaining what they are trying to achieve and provides code to illustrate the issue. They also explain why they implemented their solution in a particular way and describe what happens when they try to fix it. The question concludes with a clear statement of what they want to accomplish and the specific question they are asking. A “smart question,” indeed!
Someone responded with a “smart” answer. The answerer first explained why the issue occurred, providing an example of the problematic code. They then offered a solution, including a code snippet to demonstrate the fix. Because the original question was well-crafted and thorough, the user received a concise and effective answer.
Now to talk about not-so-smart questions. Essentially a not-so-smart question is the antithesis of a smart question. While on StackOverflow while there are many good questions, there are a handful of bad ones. Eric Raymond says that before asking any question on the forum you should do things like searching the forums for someone answering it, searching the web, reading the manual, reading a FAQ, reading source code, etc. I really bad one is when people just straight up post their whole code into the question and ask someone to help them fix it, typically someone trying to get answers to their homework problem. While I had a hard time finding a really bad question, I found one that breaks one of the rules above. The example can be seen through this link.
As you can see the user asks a very simple question about how to exit vim. They provided a snippet of what it tells them to type to exit and what happens when they do so. The user then expresses that it just appears in the object’s body. This seems like a very simple question, and probably one that could definitely be solved by typing it into a search engine like Google or even reading Vim documentation. Despite being a very novice and simple question, the user was reluctant enough to get very kind and detailed help from other people on the forum. Within the answers, you can see that people are giving step-by-step instructions, other commands to remember, and even posting diagrams that help answer the question. While this answer shows a not-so-smart question getting positive results, that is not always the case. Depending on the severity of the type of question, you may get ignored or even downvoted. Though they got their answer, it would have been better if they searched it up online or read the documentation to get the answer.
This experience taught me the importance of proper etiquette when asking programming questions online. While many experienced programmers are willing to help, it can be tempting to post every problem without first trying to solve it yourself. However, these forums are not magic solutions — they are communities of real people with busy lives. They don’t want to spend time answering questions that could easily be resolved with a quick search. Before asking for help, it’s essential to try solving the problem on your own, do some research, and be considerate of others’ time and effort. If you are going to ask a question before to ask it in a mindful way.