There Is Such Thing As "Not So Smart" Questions!
25 Jan 2018As a fifteen years old Vietnamese immigrant from Vietnam to America, there was a lot of things for me to learn and experience in the new country I now declared as home. Among those things are different perspectives on asking questions. In the schools I went in Vietnam, questions during class were not encouraged because it can be interpreted as a sign of slowness in the questioner’s mind. If I were to ask a question that had an obvious answer, I could tell that I had just ‘dug a hole’ for myself by looking at the faces of my peers; better yet, some teachers would recite the exact question I had just asked him/her as a way of telling me: “I have just told you about this.” Therefore, when I moved to the classroom setting in the US, inevitably, I carried the same mindset.
Fortunately, this mindset started to rust away as I witnessed many teachers happily answered any questions throwing at them while saying: “There is no such thing as dumb questions!” Like a gorilla coming out of his cage, I started to fire away the questions I had in mind. There were times I received great responses from the teachers, my mind was like the clear sky after the rain. However, there were times the responses turned “raining kitty and puppy” into “cats and dogs.” I soon realized that phrase “There is no such thing as dumb questions!” is not complete. The missing piece to this statement is “but there is such thing as not so smart questions!”.
What was the difference between the two: asking questions the smart and not so smart way? One of the best answers to this question was answered by Eric Steven Raymond. He wrote an excellent article with the title “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.” In summary, the question that was asked in a smart way had a good amount of thoughts into it, which would help the receiver answered exactly what the sender wanted without any confusions. The “dumb-way” questions had little thought in them, which could easily make them become a duplicate or confused questions. Below are two examples from a popular online Q&A communities for software engineers, StackOverflow.
Example of asking questions the smart way:
“Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array?” Click here to see the question in more details.
One of the first obvious signs to show this question was asked in the smart way is by looking at the number of upvotes. As of right now, it has 20397 upvotes, which is relatively a lot. It has this amount of upvotes because not only the author asked a question that many people found interesting, but also it was formatted in such a very clear, precise way. He/she included sets of uncluttered code, what were done to them, the end results, and specific questions about the process. Inevitably, the experts of this community were able to answer the question in the clearest way possible.
Example of asking questions the “not-so-smart” way:
“Want the horizontal bar to graph the bars from high to low” Click here to see the question in more details.
The first sign showing this is a bad question is by looking at the title question: “Want the horizontal bar to graph the bars from high to low.” Grammatically speaking, it is incomplete. There is no interrogative word, such as: what, where, who, why, or how, and no question mark in the end. According to the Eric Raymond, this kind grammatical error can be interpreted as a sign of laziness. Coincidentally, this question was marked as a duplicate by multiple people. Someone asked a similar question more than half a year ago. This shows that the author of the question did not put the necessary amount of time researching for a solution before posting it on StackOverflow.
The two examples above illustrate different kinds of what makes a question being asked in the smart way or not-so-smart way. Seeing the difference in how the experts responded to each question compels me to practice asking questions the smart way more. This kind of skill does not come naturally to everyone, but through deliberate practices, one day, I will be able to learn any skill (software programming included) from the available experts all over the world.