Smart Questions Can Change the Future
27 Jan 2021
Words Have Power
Do you agree with this statement, “Words have power?” Imagine a stranger handed you a pen and said, “Try to sell this pen to me for $100,” do you think you would accomplish the task? The decisive factor that would separate a successful attempt and a failure are your words to promote the pen. Your speech needs to have the power to persuade the stranger that the pen is worth $100 in one way or another. In this scenario, the speech needed to have a certain degree of persuasiveness, eloquence, and coherence to accomplish the task.
This scenario helps explain the importance of smart questions for software engineers. The software engineer is the stranger, the question is the sales pitch, and the question’s correct answer is accomplishing the task. The way a question is worded is crucial because it can help lead to the answer one is searching for. To illustrate, when a smart question is asked, the following is true. The intent is clear, some of the different possible answers are filtered, and there is minimal possibility of misunderstanding. Also, a smart question can help both parties involved in this interaction because it increases the chances that the question will be answered, helps the asker learn new knowledge, and solidifies the responder’s knowledge. Also, another entity will benefit from the smart question: other people that have the same or a similar question. These individuals will be able to find, understand, and implement the solution without asking a duplicate question.
Smart Questions Actually Help
While going through StackOverflow, an example of a “smart” question popped up and proved the point. In this question, the user was trying to figure out the error in their code. The user wanted to print some data on Python, but the output did not match the intended. While the question is relatively simple, the asker formatted their question correctly. They included specific keywords in their title, organized their post clearly and efficiently that was easy to read, showed that they looked into the documentation, and explained their thought process. Therefore, the asker got the correct code for their intended output, clarified their misunderstanding, and now knows how to resolve the issue for future projects.
On the Other Hand…
At the same time, a “not smart” question appeared as well. This question states that the user has to make a project to do image processing. They explain that they need to use Svelte or React as the front-end and want to do the image processing using Matlab or Python. They end the post by asking if it was possible to accomplish their project. The issues with this question were the lack of formatting, the number of grammar mistakes, and the lack of research beforehand. This gives the impression that there was zero motivation to do this project, thus spending the time to answer the question would be a waste of time. As a result, there were zero responses to this question.
Learn by Example, Not by Experiences
Seeing the examples of “smart” and “not smart” questions on StackOverflow has shown the proper format of an effective question and the results. The “smart” questions will typically have a couple of responses, and the asker solved their problem. On the other hand, the “not smart” questions usually have zero responses. Thus, I have a better idea of how to structure my questions should I have to post in the future.