The Biggest Luser
25 Jan 2018As someone that enjoys keeping his thoughts to himself, I never enjoyed asking questions. I tend to overthink how I can ask a good question and usually end up not asking at all. Likewise, when others ask me for help I tend to overthink how to give a good answer and end up just sharing my own solution. According to Raymond’s “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way”, I ask questions like a loser, if at all, and don’t answer questions in a helpful way. As a software engineer, I know that I won’t be able to do everything on my own, and that the best professionals are good with teams. With the entire Web as my team, asking smart questions will be extremely useful for me in maximizing my productivity as an engineer.
Just like a hacker, I will write this essay to seem harsh but reasonable. Though I can empathize with “lusers” that ask for solutions without showing any meaningful effort, I believe the worst questions are the ones that don’t provoke any thought. I have seen a few open-ended questions on Stack Overflow that lose my attention before the end of the first sentence.
Feel free to call me a hater, but I would hate to have to answer a question that essentially asks, “Could you give me the solution”, and worse yet, takes so much time and re-readings to make sense of what is being asked. In that case, I would have preferred to see an example of code to attempt the solution, but even that would not have redeemed the rushed appearance and the lack of thoughtfulness with spelling and grammar. That wouldn’t seem classy to a real hacker and the response was really the best that question could have merited.
On the other hand, I’ve seen many good and thought-provoking questions. Even though they’re long, they’re concise enough and show effort and a lot of thought put into each attempt. As Raymond mentioned, the user specifies the nature and location of the error, an idea of where it may come from, and summarized his project as well as he could. As a result, questions like these are often upvoted on Stack Overflow, but more importantly they are answered completely and would help any other user with a similar problem. I hope I can train myself to ask questions like this in real life and earn a smart and helpful answer.
