We encounter people asking questions everyday. In school, somebody may ask, “Do we have a final exam?” You will probably be told to go and look at the course syllabus in response. Questions like this implies that the person has not put any effort to search for an answer themselves. Those who really want to learn would invest the time and energies to answer the question through whatever means necessary, or at least until they ran out of options. To become a skilled and resourceful software engineer, we want to continually learn no matter how many times we run into a wall. In order to continue doing so, we need to be able to ask smart questions that invoke high-quality answers that we can enchane our knowledge with.
In order to invoke smart questions, we always need to keep in mind to be in the shoes of a person who will review the question and possibly answer it. No-so-smart questions could be ignored or replied in a negative way, since not many people would enjoy wasting time answering bad questions.
For example, questions like this Bad Example already can be perceived as a low-quality question just by looking at the subject line and is likely to be ignored by many potential respondents. Most importantly, the question itself is not a question because the author is stating that the code does not work. What Not to Ask This example also lacks clear, grammatical and correctly spelled language, which would again give a bad impression to the reader. In addition, the author must provide a mimal, but sufficient amount of code to explain the bug so that the readers can understand. Overall, the question seems to be posted and writen in a rush, with no clear focus or thought behind it.
As this example shows, bad questions often do no receive clear and thorough responses. In fact, the post was closed and explained as off-topic by other users for reasons as explained above. The sole response was written in an equally careless manner.
Unlike the example above, a high-quality questions have high-quality answers. Here is an example of a good question that is asked in a smart way. Good Example First of all, the example question is very easy to understand. It explicitly and precisely describes what the problem and the question is. The author also explains the problem in a chronological order, explaining what she has been doing prior to the problem and what part of code she changed when the problem occurred.
For this question, there are a lot of well-established and detailed answers that help the author understand the concept of equalities in Java. The respondents of the question also sound eager to share their knowledge to the author. Although the examples provided are merely a couple of many questions asked, high-quality questions seem to attract high-quality responses.
The purpose of asking smart questions is to learn from the answers provided by the contributors. Bad questions are unlikely to receive high-quality answers. The ability to ask well-thought questions can help to facilitate clear and detailed responses by peers. Therefore, to become a smart software engineer, one must learn how to ask questions in a smart way.