To Question Or Not To Question That Is The Question
28 Jan 2021
The Art In Questions
I had my eyes recently opened in asking the smart and right way of asking questions, and it was a real eye opener for me. At work, during training, each new employee would have to take a training course on how to ask proper question. Asking a question is a two-way conversation, for example, if a customer had come in and asked “my phone is broken” you would automatically in your mind consider that a dumb question. That question/statement does not help the person asking or myself from helping one another get to a solution, if anything if would take longer to get there because I would have to put on my detective hat ask a few more questions to help narrow down the issue.
Working in tech especially in the troubleshooting aspect of tech, I know how to ask questions when it’s time for me to get an issue resolved. For example, recently I had gotten a new phone and as soon as I booted up my phone, I get an alert that my device wasn’t activated. The tech support in me kicked into high gear. My first instinct is to wait a few more moments to see if the device will automatically try to reconnect with the network, after a few moments I got the same activation error. My next Instinct was to reboot my device, failed again, my next instinct was to pop out the sim try to no avail. I put the device in airplane mode and turned it off, still nothing. I jumped on googled to see if there were any known issues or any fixes for my issues, nothing, which would make sense because the phone has only been out for a few months. After trying all those trouble shooting techniques and still could resolve my issues. This is the part where I relented and finally decided to call into my carrier to seek some help.
Once I got on the phone with them, they would ask me as I’m sure they ask everyone “How they could help me out today”. I would then reply with “Well I just got a new phone today, and when I booted up my phone and was going through the setup process, I received an alert on my device, stating that activation failed. I was just calling to see if there was any way you would be able to help me fix my issue?”, I would then explain to the representative all of the steps that I have taken on my own to try to resolve it.
Asking a question like “My Phone is broken; can you help me?” doesn’t really help the person who is trying to help. The person needing help didn’t really give any information on what caused the issue in the first place or any steps they have done to try to resolve their issue. However, if the same person came in and rephrased their question by “I keep getting this alert on my phone that my phone hasn’t been backed up in XxX days and I’ve searched the web to see if I could find a solution but really couldn’t find anything near to the issue that I’m having, I was wonder if you would know anything and if you could help me out?” would be a better question because the person stated the exact issue they were having and what they have done to try to resolve the issue themselves, which saves the person helping them a step cause they know they will no longer have to search the web and is able to find a solution elsewhere.
Asking smart questions in software engineering is important for both parties because the common denominator in this, is time. If a person isn’t asking the right questions, they are wasting the time of the person who is trying to help them out and end up doing wasting more of their time because no one would want to help them because they have gained the reputation of asking dumb questions.
To Question Or Not To Question A Hacker
A post from John would be considered a smart question. His Subject line is directly connected to his question. The subject line states, “The entitlements in your app bundle signature do not match the ones that are contained in the provisioning profile” and the body of his question shows the code error he is exactly doing and in bullet steps he has done on his own to help him find a resolution to his problem. Such steps he has taken is cleaning up his project, re-enabling automatic app signing in XCODE, deleting his provisioning files (file pathway included), and so forth. The thing that takes Johns smart question a step further is he has included updates to his question body as time passes, to keep the readers informed on the status of his issue.
A post from Ryanv048 (yes this is me asking a question before being aware of proper smart question etiquette) would be a good example of a question that did not fulfill a good chunk from Raimonds’ post. The subject line had a word mis-spelled, however, had a concise and straight to the point question. The body of the question could have gone better. The poster just stated the question he was asking and did not go any further into detail on his question. The poster failed to include and relevant codes nor any steps he has taken to help himself. Overall, the body of his post is a single line.
Subsequently John’s post garnered over 1000 views with multiple answers, although, he received multiple answers they were answers that were directly releated to his question without any extra jargon. In regards to John receving a multiple answers the famous saying "Its about quality not quantity" that prevailed. On the otherhand, Ryanv048’s post garnered a lousy 192 view and was closed my moderators for lacking to add details and clarity to the problem, in contrast Johns was not.
If You Question You Shall Receive
If a person were to ask a non-smart question, the answer received will almost always be a non-smart answer or a follow-up question from a person trying to help you. Such is the case with Ryanv048s post. He asks a non-smart question and received follow-up questions, a hint that was somewhat helpful, and a link. The questions that were asked were if the problem was a signed or unsigned, 64 bit or 32 bits, and the awesome question of “What Have You Tried?”. You can view that comment here. A hint that was given is “ In C, zero is false, non-zero is true” you can view that hint here, and the link that was given was a link for geeksforgeek.org which can be found here.
Although a lot more people helped Ryanv048 with his issue, it only left him more confused because “there was too many cooks in the kitchen” with many different approaches. The One thing that Ryanv048 did right, is that every time he received a reply, he was very appreciative and thankful to the person helping him out. Overall, after looking at his post most people were nice enough to take the time out of their very busy day to help a person. They weren’t rude or bullish in any way, shape, or form just genuinely helpful.
On the flip side Johns question garnered many answers and the answers he received were relatively similar to how he posted his question. NYSamnang is one those people who helped John with his issue. NYSamnang confirmed that he too was having the same issue as John and gave a theory as to why they both were having the issue. After his theory he gave evidential proof as how he arrived at that theory and even gave John a potential fix to his issue as the fix had worked for NYSamnang.
Both questions receive multiple answer however, Johns question elicited more clear and detailed answer, whereas Ryanv048s question elicited more questions and vague replies, and hyperlinks. The contrast in between a smart question and not-so-smart question are far and wide. To be able to properly get the right kind of help and get the right kind of guidance you definitely would need to ask questions more properly and not leave it up for the reader to assume what your intent to the question is because if you don’t you might highly run the risk in not getting any answer to your question or you might be led astray.
Fin
After reading Eric Steven Raymond’s “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way”. It has made me more hyper-aware to the questions that I ask in a programmer’s world. Asking probing questions to a customer at work is a norm to me and I don’t really think twice about. However, reading Raymond’s question about how and why its import to ask smart question made be a little embarrassed because some of the points that Raymond touches on what not to do is exactly the very thing that I have done as can be seen from my very own stack overflow question, and at the same time I feel truly reinvigorated and excited to ask another question knowing and being enlightened on Raymond’s article.
Some of the things that I will take away is mentioning what are some things that I have done to try to resolve my own issues, just as I would want a customer to tell me what sort of steps have, they done to help themselves out. Another thing that I will take away is being detailed in as much as possible in my subject line. The reason for that is like most of us we will only read a few lines on an alert on our phones, if those few lines are intriguing enough, we would take the time out of our day to finish what the rest of the alert was about otherwise, we would just ignore the alert and continue on our day. Just as the case with the subject line when asking smart questions.