Is It Smart to Ask Smart Questions?
27 Jan 2021Asking Questions
When working on a piece of code, you may sometimes encounter a problem that you try to figure out on your own, but cannot seem to find the answer for. When this is the case, you may end up going on the internet to ask questions about your problem. Now the question is, should you ask smart questions? Is it important for people like software engineers to ask smart questions? Or are stupid questions good enough?
The Smart Question
When thinking about smart questions, you want to make sure how your question is presented and answered is efficient and effective. An example of what I think is a smart question is taken from Stack Overflow.
The question asked is about why a variable is undefined when it is modified inside a function. I find this question to be smart because it does not just ask what causes the issue, but the person asking wants to know why it is happening. Asking about why such an event is happening can bring people who answer your problem not just give you a short answer, but a detailed one. In this question, one person who answered first gave a short answer as to what kind of problem it is, then went into detail into why it is happening. Getting the details into why this issue occurs can help you understand more about the issue and can help you troubleshoot similar problems in the future.
The Stupid Question
When it comes to stupid questions, it can depend on how you ask the question, where you ask it, or what kind it is. One question that I found from Stack Overflow shows what a stupid question can be. The question is from a new programmer trying to print “Hello World” and seems to be having issues, so is asking what is happening. Questions like these should be common and probably asked numerous times on the internet. So, it does not do anyone good when someone takes their time to answer the question when you can search up the issue through Google. That being said, there is another issue with the question, and that is it is not clear. Especially when it comes to programs, it would be nice to type out what kind of error messages you would be getting if there are any. The responses to the question are expected from such a question. One of the responses is a link to another question that got answered which could be related to the issue the user is asking. As you can tell by that response, these types of problems are common and answered often, so asking more of these similar questions doesn’t contribute to the community. Another response bluntly points out that you should try searching on the internet if someone already asked a similar question as it is common, and adds a link on how to ask questions. So, not only did the author of the question didn’t get a direct answer to their question, they were told to search up the issue since it is a common one.
Smart or Stupid
So, after covering an example for a smart and stupid question, is it important for software engineers to ask smart questions? Or are stupid question just enough? In the end, asking smart questions as a software engineer should be the way to go. The reason for this is because if you want to improve yourself as a software engineer, you would want to know the details of your problem, instead of having yes or no answers and just take the answer at face value without understanding why it is the solution to your problem. You may come across similar problems, and you will probably ask a similar question again with another similar answer because you did not ask a smart question where someone who answers it gives you details on why it is occurring. You can apply what you learned with your smart question on what can cause the issues for future troubleshooting and help you improve the quality of your program. Seeing both what a smart and stupid question can be, I want to make sure that I ask smart questions when I can to improve the quality of the answers I get and improve myself. That being said, stupid questions may not always be bad because maybe you’re not a software engineer and you may not care about the details of what your program is doing and just want it to work. Both smart and stupid questions can have their purposes, and whatever type of question you ask, just think about your question and what you want to expect the answers to the question to be, may it be a yes or no answer, or a detailed answer.