How asking smart questions can help you!

12 Sep 2019

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Smart questions? What is that?

Eric Raymond wrote a blog about asking smart questions, but what exactly does it mean? Well, a smart question is a question that had a lot of thought put into it. It is a question that shows you had tried to solve your problem on your own using various ways of methods. These methods include reading the API or manual and using Google to search for phrases related to your problem.

There are many personal benefits if you try to solve your problem on your own first before asking a question. One very important benefit is that you get to understand the solution better because you made sense of it on your own and made connections to how it solves the problem. This means that you are more likely to remember the solution once a similar problem comes up rather than if someone simply told you the answer.

Another reason is that this shows that you respect the time of the person you are asking. This is because you avoid wasting that individual’s time with a question that could have been simply looked up on Google in less than a minute. They could have been feeling overwhelmed with other tasks that they needed to get done, and taking the time off from those tasks to answer an easily searchable question is rude to the person.

An example of a smart question

Now that we have established what is a smart question and why it is beneficial to ask them, what would be example?

This would be an example of a smart question

The person who asked the question had attempted to solve it his own by trying to search phrases related to his problem on Google. Not only did he use Google, but he had also shown the exact error in his program that he encountered. Furthermore, he formulated his own idea of what could be a potential answer to his question.

This question was also able to be answered in such a way that was very informative and insightful, and since he had turned up empty when he searched up his own question, other people later down the line who might also encounter the same problem would now have their answer just by searching it up.

An example of a not-smart question

This would not be complete without a counter example for the opposite of a smart question.

This would be an example of a not-smart question

Although basic questions could be considered a smart question depending on how you ask it, this, however, was not a smart question as it could have been easily solved by searching it up on Google. In fact, searching up the phrase “How to output hello world” brings up many different guides on how to do it and in various languages as well. Not only was it a very easy question to look up, it also does not contribute to anyone because there are plenty of well made guides for people starting out in programming. This question does not serve a purpose to anyone but the person asking it.