How to Be Smart About Not Being Smart
25 Jan 2024
When it comes to trying to get help from others, a lot of people are either lost as to what to do or what to say to someone they want help from, or they are scared to even ask in the first place for fear of being looked down upon or not living up to some self-imposed standards. What some fail to understand, however, is that being able to ask others questions and get the help you need is what will help you live up to those self-imposed standards and help you grow in whatever field you are attempting to grow your understanding in. Part of this process is to ask the right questions though, and not knowing how to do so will do more harm than good for your prospects of growing in the future. There are right and wrong things you must do when asking a question, especially in popular online coding help forums such as Stack Overflow.
Bad Questions
Posted above are the links to 2 specific questions that I spotted on Stack Overflow that came across to be as a “bad question”, or in better terms, a question that not only might not be likely to get you an answer (even if these specific examples have some) but can make it so that instead of assisting your learning development, you simply delay it by getting the correct answer spoon-fed to you. One references a very basic command in an extremely common text-based code editor, and the other simply asks for help with a specific question that they can’t solve, the first of which has a very simple solution that I was able to find from Google in less than 5 minutes! These are examples of “bad questions” because they either show a lack of genuine attempts to solve the problem or show a lack of want to understand and instead simply seek answers from others more intelligent than them.
Great Questions
Now onto better things, we have these 2 much better examples of questions asked on Stack Overflow that show a genuine interest in properly understanding the concepts and giving helpful examples and visuals for those readers to give much better responses to your question. What each question is about is not particularly important in this case, however, what is important is the content of the questions they asked and how they were formatted and worded. Both were very concise and asked relevant and important questions, showed previous attempts at figuring out the issue or question at hand on their own and once they were left at a loss came to an online forum for assistance, and went into as much specifics about the problem or question at hand as they could to be as clear as possible.
The Path Onward
Learning how to gravitate more towards asking well-made questions to others, especially on online forums, is important for growing your database of knowledge about the topic. A couple of important things to note: 1) Always try to solve the question or problem on your own first and 2) Use as many resources as possible to further your understanding outside of others, such as Google or manuals on software or previously answered questions. Take these things to heart and learn to be able to rely on others whenever necessary, and I can guarantee your path upward will be that much smoother.
