Ever since we were children, we were taught “there’s no such thing as a bad question.” I found this to be wildly inaccurate and my teachers would often scorn me for asking dumb questions. As a sales person, I found that bad questions are the WORST, they can not only make the person you are asking feel unlistened to, but it can create horrible awkward silences.
What would be an example of a dumb question? To explain this, I must break it down into three parts: -Bad Timing of questions -Bad Delivery of questions -Redundant Questions For bad timing of questions, this wouldn’t be too applicable to stack overflow since there is no preface to the questions. An example of this would be if the teacher was talking about Spain and you ask “how fast can turkeys fly?” up to 55 Miles Per Hour by the way.
Bad Delivery of questions is the biggest culprit that plagues engineers because of them either being socially inept or them not thinking the question through before asking it. To me, even if the question is bad, it can be made better by a great delivery. A great delivery would be addressing you understand what the speaker is saying by rephrasing what they have said, then adding to it asking them to elaborate on the point they are most passionate about. If the person is not passionate about the thing you are about to ask about, stir interest or ask a different person. Also, always be humble when asking so the answerer can feel important (people love feeling important). The other biggest pitfall would be to make it feel like you’re interrogating the person, when asking questions, you should never make the person uncomfortable by asking it too directly. Personally, I prefer to make a joke to preface the questions or transition to it naturally. This is inapplicable to stackoverflow, but I also always make sure to put upward inflections in my voice if it’s a light hearted question.
The third topic, which is the most simple topic, are redundant questions. If you were to ask a redundant question, just preface it with “I understand that XYZ, but can you further elaborate on ZPY? You seem knowledgeable and I wouldn’t want to miss your input on this.”
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59998991/how-to-modify-javascript-code-for-subtraction Here is an example of a bad delivery of a question, however, it was an easy question so people wanted to answer it. The reason I hate the way this question was worded was because it was too simple, people may find it attractive to answer a straightforward question, but if this were beside a well written question that summarizes what they already know and what they would like to know, this question would have gotten more replies.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59999000/mathematical-guarantee-in-trignometric-functions-of-cuda This is an example of what I think is a well-put question, but the question is specific so people did not answer it. I liked this question because it was easy to understand and it explained what he knows and what he would like to know.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59865067/alternative-for-assembly-loadfile-assembly-loadfrom-and-assembly-load This is an example of a well-put question that is hard, but people answered anyways because it was well-put. The biggest thing with this question was the readability. This doesn’t apply to asking questions in real life (which I feel is a significantly harder skill to learn), but the formatting on this question was good. There was a summary at the bottom and the question asker explains what he knows, so the person answering can tell he thought about it already. There’s nothing more frustrating than a person that doesn’t understand what they’re asking.