There's Smart and Then There's, Well, Not Smart
07 Sep 2023
Smart Way of Asking a Question
When asking yourself “What is a smart question,” one may not know the answer to it because it is subjective. Many people think any question that is asked is smart simply because it’s a question. Even though a question being smart is subjective, a person writing questions may still feel the need to find a way to write a “smart question.” A good place to start is to follow a guideline or a set of principles that will help a person develop their question into being smart. For developers and programmers who need help with solving, debugging, or fixing their code, they can refer to Eric Steven Raymond’s, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. In this reading, Raymond goes through a set of principles that will help developers and programmers ask smart questions in the Stack Exchange community.
Following Raymond’s principles, I was able to find a smart question in the StackOverflow community. Briefly, the question that this user asked the community is to help the user understand more about how their memoized function works in JavaScript. All of Raymond’s principles were covered in this question such as making the question clear to understand, providing background information on the question, providing their thoughts about the question, and the user was explicit as to what they wanted answered. Although this question is a fairly new post, this user already got a response from someone. This one response gives the user a clear and concise answer to their question.
Smart Question Link: StackOverflow
Not Smart of Asking a Question
The principles that are established by Raymond make it easy for developers to ask questions online. However, not every developer and programmer knows about Raymond’s guidelines which in turn leads to their question being, well, “not smart.” For instance, the Stackoverflow question that was asked by this user is an example of asking a question in a “not smart way.” This user was trying to get help as they are trying to make a click operation on a standalone application, and they are unable to click the element. To point out first, the user’s question is very vague, grammatically incorrect, and not clear to understand at all. Also, not much information is given to help with why this user’s operation is running other than a single line of code. This user didn’t input his thoughts as to why their operation wasn’t working and at the end of their question, they said “I need solution for the issue where i can perform the automation.”
I did notice that the user did get a reply back to their question but not one that I think they were hoping for. Rather than an answer as the user was probably expecting, the user instead got a hint as to why their operation wasn’t running and where to look to help solve their question.
Not Smart Question link: StackOverflow
Importance of Asking Smart Questions
An important thing that I picked up while reading through Raymond’s principles and trying to find smart and not smart questions in StackOverflow, is that the quality of answers you get from others on the internet relies heavily on how well you ask your questions. From the two examples that I found, I was able to see firsthand how asking smart questions gets a person more help than asking a not-so-smart question. I think that asking questions that are smart in an online community is more beneficial to the person who asked the question because the people in the community gain more understanding and information which in turn leads to more beneficial answers.