“There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” -Your 5th grade teacher, probably.
So I was reading this amazing article provided to our ICS314 class at UH Manoa, and I was thinking to myself the whole time, “YES! THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL!”. After I finished reading it, I wanted to give my insight on “asking questions the smart way.”
A lot of people have probably told you that there’s no such thing as a stupid question. This is only half true. Asking questions should be encouraged over staying silent and not asking, and therefore not knowing, but there definitely are stupid questions that people should not ask, and I’m gonna tell you what they are.
It would be foolish of me to rag on stupid questions without really explaining what I mean by that, wouldn’t it? And there’s nothing wrong with asking questions to learn, or for clarification, or any reason you would ask a question. What constitutes a stupid question is really the manner in which it is asked. In other words, there are no stupid questions, but there are stupid ways to ask them.
Well, what’s a stupid way to ask a question? A “dumb” question primarily consists of one or more of the following factors:
Most of these points illustrate one major thing: Don’t look to be spoonfed the answer. Whenever you are asking a question, always ask yourself this one question: Do you want an answer, or do you want to learn? If you just want an answer, and you say something like “Here’s my code. It doesn’t work. Fix it.”, how does that help anyone? You learn nothing, and you irritate whoever you asked because they know you learn nothing. It’s disrespectful, helps no one, and is honestly just downright lazy. When you ask a question this way, you check almost all of these “dumb question factors”. Don’t do that. Don’t be stupid.
Smart people are also more likely to answer smart questions. In general, smart people don’t like answering stupid questions (especially for free!) since they’re a waste of time for everyone involved. The answerer is not challenged, and the asker is not learning anything. If you want good answers, and to learn from your questions, ask questions the smart way, so that smart people will answer them.
Here’s a couple excerpts from StackOverflow that I found, which I hope will illustrate what constitutes a good or bad question.
These are a list of bad questions:
What’s wrong with these questions? Well, let’s break it down. These are all the problems that can be found in these questions:
By looking at the comments and the quality of answers the askers received, we can see these are bad questions. Many answers were one-liners and don’t go into depth at all, with only a couple answers in total. Comments are scathing, where some people even say nothing more than “google it”. One answer is even nothing more than corrected code without any attempt to explain it. If you ask stupid questions, this is what you will receive on average. Avoid this so you can get good responses.
These are a couple good questions:
In comparison to the bad questions, what do these questions do right?
The quality of these questions’ answers and comments is much higher. The answers are plentiful with very in-depth explanations and solutions, particularly for Questions 1 and 2. The comments section in Question 3 also consists of a lot of in-depth troubleshooting which was most likely very helpful for the asker.
Looking at the quality of responses from the good questions compared to the bad ones is like night and day. Looking at the questions and analyzing them (as well as reading the essay), I (and hopefully you too!) gained a lot of insight into what constitutes a good, smart, question versus a bad, stupid, question, the quality of answers and responses each type of question will receive, and how to make sure I ask questions the smart way versus the stupid way.
So remember, whevnever you ask a question, don’t ask it like an idiot would. Ask it like a smart person would. Don’t ask stupid questions, ask smart ones.