Asking Smart Questions
29 Jan 2020
Working with teams is a huge part of having a career in Computer Science, as a result, mastering communication is the key to be successful in the field. When programming, we often would find ourselves stuck in a problem or simply can’t figure out the problem causing warnings or errors in your program. In a sheer moment, our first instinct is to google the problem or going to forums and finding the solution.
Before asking a question, solving the problem first and figuring out the exact problem while understanding it is the right way. If you ask a question without understanding your error, when the explanation is given, you’ll be more likely to be even more confused than understanding the given hint. Furthermore, you would be wasting someone’s time by asking a question that can actually be found by using google.
Asking Smart Questions
An example of a smart question.
Even though the question is minimal, the person asked a smart question. Before venturing through the forums for people’s answer, the person googled for the solutions themselves. Moreover, they implemented some methods they might’ve thought would solve the problem. They know the problem, their question is straightforward and easy to understand because the person knows what they want to do in their code.
Asking Not-Smart Questions
The person simply posted their entire code and depended on the people that would look at their problem. They did not attempt to understand their code or look for the problem itself. The person should’ve break down their code one by one by observing every line of code and figuring out their functions or how they work. However, they only mentioned that they have a problem, but didn’t exactly state the actual problem. This question will only waste other people’s time than can be used for something productive other than answering this question.