Why Won't I Get a Text Back?
08 Sep 2022
What is a “Smart” question?
What exactly is a “smart” question you may ask? Well there is no exact answer to this question, but a “smart” question can be thought of as a question that is concise and specific. In order to ask a “smart” question you must be able to describe what you are trying to do and which part you are stuck on, not just how you solve the problem. When asking a question, discuss what is happening and what went wrong instead of discussing what you think happened. One of, if not the most important thing to a “smart” question is to write precisely with proper grammar and correct spelling. When attempting to ask a question you need to have proper grammar and spelling so that whomever is going to answer your question is able to understand what you are trying to ask. Being able to ask “smart” questions is important for software engineers because when asking a problem about a coding problem we want to be specific so that whoever answers the question knows exactly what they are looking for. Being able to present “smart” questions allows us as software engineers to better explain our work and get much better results when asking for help. As a software engineer if we do not ask “smart” questions then we will get very vague responses and probably not receive any valuable help with our problem.
Perks of a “Smart” Question
A place that many software engineers go to ask questions is on StackOverflow. StackOverflow is a place that has questions of all types of coding problems in various coding languages where people can ask questions and receive answers from the community. An example that I have found on StackOverflow of a “smart” question is shown here on StackOverflow. The question is asking why processing in a sorted array faster than an unsorted array, this follows the steps of a “smart” question because source code is provided, the questions being asked are concise, there are no grammatical errors, and provides some of the research done for this problem. Throughout this problem all of the necessary code to run these programs are provided both in C++ and also in Java, the question being asked is very specific and to the point and explains what is happening with the code. The question is well worded and easy to understand, and provides two links that were used to research on this problem and also to show what the user had done before asking this question. When going through the answers provided by the community there are very detailed and helpful answers to this question and other answers that provide even more insight on previous answers as well.
The Community Making Fun of You
A question that was found on StackOverflow that does not demonstrate the “smart” way of asking questions can be found here. This question was asking about a simple hello world program using C++ and why he was unable to compile this program on three different compilers. Why does this question not follow the standards of a “smart” question as established by Raymond? The reason for this is that the question is not concise, his code is a picture of handwritten code, and he assumed that one of the compilers had a very serious bug. The question is long and has a lot of unnecessary words that can be shortened to one small paragraph instead of multiple. The person who asked the question has a typed out version of the outputs but the actual code is a scanned picture of some handwritten code. Near the end of the question the user says “I think there is a very serious bug in Clang because when I tried using it to compile the renamed program, it flipped out, printed “84 warnings and 20 errors generated.” and made my computer beep a lot!” which shows that they assume some of the problem has to do with the compiler without any proof that there was a problem with the compiler. Instead of assuming that they did something wrong they are assuming that the compiler has done something wrong. Some of the answers provided by the community demonstrate that this type of question does not lead to effective help as when scrolling through the various different answers there are only a few actual helpful answers with the rest being jokes and people making fun of his writing. Some examples of these answers include someone talking about their braces not matching well and that they should draw them better, and another talking about how the user should use another font, and many other unserious answers.