Dumb Questions Do Exist
08 Sep 2022
“There are no Dumb Questions”
Oftentimes, throughout middle and highschool, students are told the mantra: “There are no dumb questions”. This is an effective way to get students to ask questions more frequently and without the fear of judgment however, this sentiment is wrong. I have been asked countless times by friends and family questions that could be solved with a five second google search, questions I could not possibly know the answer to, or questions so vague you have to clarify what they mean. These are all stupid questions not because of the content of the questions, but because of the lack of thought from the person asking. This mentality can be found on any online forum but is found most prominently on places like Stack Overflow and other programming forums.
## Smart vs Dumb Questions A clear example of the sort of lack of thought that is mentioned above is a post entitled “Why is my code broken?”. This “informative” title is then followed by two paragraphs of run-on sentences that lack any sort of clarity or precision. He elaborates on how his project is due soon and gives two massive code blocks containing all of the data. This post is bad because it shows no thought to the person answering the question. Upon finding the question, the person trying to answer the question would have to read through two paragraphs to figure out what is being asked along with any context. They would then have to search through the entirety of this person’s code to find any potential issues. This is made even more apparent when you consider he gave no error message or indication of what is wrong. This post is an example of asking a not smart question because it requires the person answering to do much more work than would ideally be needed for a question of this scope. A clear comparison to this would be a post titled “SQL injection that gets around mysql_real_escape_string()”. In this post, the person asking the question “Is there an SQL injection possibility even when using mysql_real_escape_string() function?” and gives a brief example with code showing a possible situation. This question, in comparison to the previous one, is direct and to the point about what is being asked. The question is quite niche and far more specific, even providing an example of what he is talking about. This post is short and to the point, without any major spelling or grammatical errors which makes it easier to understand from the perspective of someone trying to answer the question.
Importance of Smart Questions
As a software engineer, I think the main reasons for asking smart questions would be to reduce the time needed to answer the questions. A lot of what are outlined as “bad questions” are questions that take too long to answer or require a lot of interpreting on the side of the person who answers. Eric Steven Raymond, creator of “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way” expresses the problem with that when he argues that “Those people most likely to be able to give you a useful answer are also the busiest people”. He goes on to elaborate that professionals are few and far between and only have so much time to give. Ultimately, these professionals who have a limited amount of time pick questions that are easy to understand and require less effort to respond to. This boils down to not asking someone to fix your code but asking them what is wrong and fixing it yourself.
When it comes to answers online, it’s easy to believe that there’s an unlimited amount of help for an unlimited amount of people. It’s easy to think of websites like stack overflow as a google for programming questions but I think this reduces the people who answer the questions to mere search results as opposed to real people with real lives. What reading through these questions has shown me is that there is a limited amount of good help to go around. This means to the best of our ability, we should strive to ask smarter questions for both our sake and for the people who answer. The less time they have to spend understanding our question, the better the answer will be.