There is always that one student during lecture that constantly asks questions and you are wondering if they would ever stop. I personally appreciate these kinds of people because they provide interaction with the professor and allow the audience to acquire more material during lectures. However, there are students who ask “not-so-smart” questions who take up lecture time for both the professor and students. After reviewing Raymond’s guidelines on how to ask questions the smart way, this made me realize that these skills do not only pertain to the software engineering field, but it can help with the real world and in school. As software engineers, learning how to properly manage your time and using available resources. Raymond’s paper is a great example on how to properly manage your time while being productive with your work. Asking simple questions will not make it easier for you or the helper on the forum you are posting on.
How can we define what a smart question? A smart question must be informative, clear, and precise. You also must know what your problem is with whatever code you are having a bug with. Providing suggestions on how to solve your own problem is also a great way to make your question look more professional and serious. Most of the forum browsers are usually people who help others in need with their own free time. While doing these simple tasks, you may nonchalantly solve your own question before posting it on the forum. But if you do not solve it, that is still acceptable because the helpers would be able to identify your problem easily and know that you care with the way the question is posted.
What is a “not-so-smart” question? A “not-so-smart” question would be the complete opposite of a smart question. The original poster for the question would give little to no effort to assist the helpers answer the question. One example would be having a subject header that consist of “Please help me!” or a subject header with an irrelevant and lengthy title. Spelling and grammatical errors will also make the forum post unappealing to the community. Instead of asking straight forward questions like, “How do I complete this logic in C?”, describing your goal would allow the helper to analyze your problem more efficiently and provide a better answer in the end. There are many ways on how to describe a smart question and a “not-so-smart” question. The next section will provide smart question and “not-so-smart” question examples from StackOverflow, in my opinion.
After refreshing the page from StackOverflow, a new question will appear within a few seconds. I personally think asking questions is not a bad thing because learning from others can be a benefit for some people. As stated earlier, knowing where to find your resources is key to becoming a successful software engineer. Asking a question that has already been solved would be a “not-so-smart” question. StackOverflow is a famous website for programmers so there could be thousands of new questions per day and one of those questions could be yours and already solved. After reviewing some of the questions from StackOverflow, here are some questions that I thought were “not-so-smart”: NSS Question 1 & NSS Question 2. Here are some questions that I personally thought were smart: S Question 1 & S Question 2. For the “not-so-smart” (NSS) questions I chose, these questions were not clear at all. NSS Question 1 only gave the error message and did not give any suggestions or even provided a way for the helpers to answer the poster’s question. For NSS Question 2, the person who posted this question only provided a textbox with code in it. The code format also looks sloppy and unappealing. There are even helpers who are confused on what the initial question the poster is asking for. For S Question 1, I thought this was a great question because it provided neat code, the post was nicely formatted, the questions were clear, and the poster even provided sources of the topics he/she was talking about. For S Question 2, the code is nicely formatted and the question is also very clear. The poster provided examples to assist the helpers to answer the question efficiently.
Overall, smart questions are a more efficient way to communicate with others especially in the software engineering field. Using this method in the outside world can benefit you as well. In my opinion, “not-so-smart” questions are always not that terrible. Sometimes the question help with cannot be expanded into bits and pieces for the helper to easily solve. However, you can turn that “not-so-smart” question into a smart question by improving the format, avoiding spelling and grammatical errors, providing a straightforward title, and adding examples.