Importance of Asking Questions
26 Jan 2021Asking questions is a powerful way of acquiring knowledge, especially for someone attached to a computer science background. As a software engineer, one runs into countless issues with complexity ranging from easy to hard. Software developers have to rely heavily on the resources that are already available on the internet. To get meaningful insights on a particular question from the project they are working on requires them to ask concise questions for which they need an answer. Failure to do so will result in a lack of response and possibly wrong answers since it’s likely that the top level developers have deemed it unnecessary to spend their valuable time understanding the question that has been awfully put together.
Good Questions
Questioning is a powerful tool for unlocking values in individuals and improving interpersonal bonding. Asking a clear and concise question is one of the essential traits that every software developer should possess. Right questions cut off the waiting time for an answer significantly and are more likely to be answered by experts on that topic. According to Raymond in his article “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way,” a good question is a stimulus and a gift that helps us develop our understanding and often reveals problems we might not have noticed or thought otherwise. One example of a question that illustrates most of the things that one should first consider before asking a question is below,
I came across the above post while scrolling through the stack overflow website. The question is correctly put together explained. This makes it more likely to be answered as the helper perceives that the recipient of help has provided enough time and effort by asking a sensible question.
Bad Question
Below is an example of the wrong question. The recipient of the help has failed to provide sufficient information to support his problems, such as the language that he is using, OS, etc. Thus, he has failed miserably to land a single answer despite being viewed over 14,000 times. Not seeing enough information in the question being asked is a turn off for the majority of experts. So it is crucial that we do our homework and put together a brief and concise answer. Otherwise, the probability of getting a solution will be close to none.
