Smarter Questions Make Smarter Answers
05 Sep 2023
Ah, the good ol’ internet
Anyone who’s browsed forums on the Internet can tell you their fair share of stories of the times they’ve experienced some of the worst interactions between people online, even in forums where the main purpose should be the sharing of information, advice, and help.
With the anonymity of the Internet, it just seems that everyone tends to forget that the random various posts you see are from real, breathing people. Whether it’s the post creator acting as if it’s everyone else’s responsibility to correct their every mistake or someone with an ego acting as if the post creator has murdered their entire family, there’s no shortage of insanity that goes on.
Work smarter, not harder
Within Eric Raymond’s “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way”, he attempts to provide guidelines for how to best communicate with others in forums such as these to try and reduce the amount of these incidents, whether you are the one seeking help or the one replying to requests for help.
Clear, concise communication is basically the forefront of his advice, with him detailing how to ask for help, the information you should provide (what you understand and what you’ve tried), and how to format everything properly. Other advice he provides is knowing where to post your requests for help and understanding the etiquette of the boards that you’re posting in.
Clear questions, clear answers…
Stack Overflow is one such forum dedicated to developers who want to ask for technical advice. Here, someone has asked the question of “Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array?”, where they’re confused about the huge gap between the sorting times of a sorted and unsorted array.
This is an example of someone asking a question in a “smart way”, where they provide formatted code as an example of what they’re talking about, provide a clear explanation of what they’re confused by, talk about why they think it’s happening and what they’ve done, and then give two questions at the very end with bullet points so that anyone who reads the post knows exactly what they want answered.
The replies they receive also reflect this conciseness. The top comment to this post is from someone who gives an analogy for why this is happening for those who might need a different frame of reference to better understand it, provides examples of code to remove this discrepancy, and has everything formatted for maximum readability.
…and the opposite of that
On the other hand, in this Stack Overflow post, the poster simply provides an image of the error that they’re getting, the error line, and asks the question “How to resolve?”.
Without the rest of the code and knowledge of what they’re attempting to do, I imagine that it would be difficult for other more experienced people to provide help without having to ask for more clarifying information. This would delay the help that they get and wastes time with what probably could have been clarified before. This is also evidenced by the lack of responses to that post.
Insights
From these examples, it can be seen how effective asking questions the “smart way” is, and how it increases the chances that you’ll receive a higher quality answer from someone who knows what they’re doing in a timely manner.
Honestly though, Raymond’s article is basically internet 101 stuff, and should be common sense to anyone who’s used a computer throughout their life (also the dude kind of comes off as annoying and pompous). Still, it’s an effective demonstration of how being clear, direct, and concise in your communications can lead to you likewise receiving the same quality of information in response.