There is something in the software engineering world that seems simple and obvious to know, how to ask good questions. At first you would think asking questions to help with your project is a simplistic task, but to get actual helpful answers it gets a bit more complicated. There is a smart way and a dumb way to ask these questions. If you actually want help and to learn from more experienced people in the software engineering field you need to know how to inquire them correctly. To show the difference between a smart and dumb question I will provide actual examples of both from StackOverflow.
Firstly for the example of a smart question, someone asked on StackOverflow about “How to divide an object into two objects and return the objects separately?”. The person that posted this question gave pictures of their code and described what was going on. They also explained what they understood so far, what’s the result of their program, and what they expect the result to be. Their program also contained author comments to describe what each section of their code does, making it easier for the reader to understand. This post is a smart and effective way to pose a question, thoroughly explain what is happening with their program, and what they want their end product to look like. They have a function that decides if the “flex” object has the correct status, in the code they only use an example check of ‘LB’. The author of the post wants to return ‘LB’ divided into two different objects. The commenters try to figure out what exactly the author wants to do and give him pointers on what to do or potential fixes for his code. For example, he uses the .map function when the answer obtained from the commenter, Barmar, explains he needs to use the .flatmap function to “ flatten this into separate array elements in the result”. In this example you can see that the person smartly asks a question on how to fix their program, resulting in getting authentic help and successfully getting their program working. Something else that the author does well is responding to comments nicely and appreciatively thanking them for their help. Link to smart question.
Next we have an example of a “not smart way” to ask a question. First off this post starts with, “What am I doing wrong?? HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Why are my sheets not linking?”. That is the title of the post and that is the worst way to start a question asking for help. They were very cryptic with what their problem was and what the expected result was supposed to be. Apparently their section of code was coded in CSS and JS but their HTML doc is not taking the instructions. They posted their code and only said that they tried to run it on different IDEs and none of them are working for them. They failed to accurately describe and elaborate on what their problem is and what the end goal is for their program. Even people in the comments were confused with what their program is used for. For example someone commented, “What exactly doesn’t take on what?” and “What exactly isn’t it doing that you expect it to do?” Those are two obvious signs of bad question asking, when people trying to help cannot actually help because they do not know what the problem is or what is trying to be accomplished. In the end, the post was also closed by StackOverflow with a note saying that there needs to be more information provided for others to answer the question. Link to not smart question.