After reading Eric Raymond’s How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, it tells us how important it is being able to ask “smart questions” is a skill for software programers. Asking questions the right way will offer yourself more effective help from others, while asking questions the wrong way will offer yourself less help, as well as waste others’ time for helping you. In order to look for good and bad examples, I took a look at questions asked in StackOverflow.
“Bad questions” you would ask would be just questions that you can google up. This question would be a perfect example of how someone asks a bad question, with its vague title, unclear description of problem / desired output, no examples of code, however prior research were included. According to Eric Raymond’s guidelines, this question has a small chance of providing effective and efficient help, if anyone even bothers to answer it. This question is an exmaple of a question that was asked with a lack of effort. The reason for why I thought this to be a bad example of question because it is being marked as a duplicate question since there were already two posts that answer his post.
“Smart questions” on the other hand includes a meaningful subject header, specific description of the problem, code examples, multiple test cases, expected output, grammatically correct, showed that prior research was done, and stay on topic. This question is a perfect example of a good questions. It has everything that Eric Raymond’s guidelines on how to ask a good question. Because the question was well made and the asker knew exactly what problem he wanted to solve, he was able to get a ton of help from the StackOverflow community compared to the bad question exmaple. It is clear that “smart questions” results in quality results. Especially when asking in a community of experts, you might take advantage of their knowledge, however, you will not end up with great responces if you ask an effortless question.