Are you asking questions the wrong place/time/way?

04 Sep 2017

Are you a lazy or smart question asker?

Throughout your career in life you will perpetually learn. Even when you think you know it all there will always be something you could know better or in a different way. This means that you might start asking questions on things you want to know about. This is where you must strategically think before you move on to asking a question just anywhere. Hopefully, the first thing you do is look online for your answer. Use those impressively built search engines like Google or Bing to see if you can find the answer before asking some of your various questions. There are many ways to ask a question and depending on what context you give they can be interpreted as a smart or lazy type of question.

An example of a lazy question would look like this. (Most of the examples I will be using will be from this site called Stack Overflow). This post is of a bad example with down votes because this site is not meant for that type of Q/A as explained in this link. This person, although granted being new at this, has not done any googling yet, in which sometimes people will give you the “let me google it for you” link. It has been ages that the internet has been up and with that much experience there have been many questions and maybe just as much answers on the web so don’t forget to try and search up your answer before posting it on sites publicly. Also don’t forget to look for the right places to ask your questions since there are a lot of forums out there which means each forum has their own purpose of questions they are looking for and not just taking on any type of questions.

On the opposite side of the spectrum there are smart questions to ask such as this. This is a popularly up voted post because of when reading this question, you can see that this person has done their homework before posting this online. It is a question most people agree with finding the answer for and it is well formatted for people to understand what this person is asking.

There are of course many more etiquettes you can learn about asking/answering questions properly and you can find that information in Eric Steven Raymond’s “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way”. This is a read recommended for all and not just the typical programmer that it refers to. This will prepare you for the future to be a more informed person in the right ways!