Dumb Questions Definitely Exist

07 Sep 2017

Who said there aren’t any stupid questions?

The person who started this saying obviously had no life and enjoyed answering every single query presented to him or her. Professors who reiterate this also invite students to waste their valuable lecture time and other students’ time. Now don’t get me wrong, I think questions are necessary and definitely help the learning process but there are certain ones that raise eyebrows and illicit rolling eyes. I’m sure we have all had to sit through a grueling five minutes of the professor saying something that we already know and is quite obvious. So does this mean that we should never ask questions? No, of course not, because being a software engineer means you are constantly learning new things and with new things come questions.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is by far one of the more popular sites where programmers go to have their questions answered. Keep in mind that the people answering however, are not paid to answer you. You may be ignored, led astray, or even chastised for a bad question. Poorly asked questions fall into three categories: lazy, vague, and the dreaded stupid.

Lazy The answerers are not your personal wikipedia. They have their own lives and jobs to attend to. If you do not show any effort in answering the question on your own, chances are they don’t want to help somebody who hasn’t dedicated their own time trying to solve the problem.
Vague Sometimes questions are too vague and do not accurately convey the problem at hand. If this happens the answerer on the other end will happily answer thinking they have made somebody’s day, only to find your reply saying “sorry you didn’t understand me, I meant this”. Therefore it is better to construct well worded questions and if possible include example code. Also try to describe the problem as best you can.
Stupid Then there are the stupid questions that do not belong on stack overflow or even deserve to be answered. These are along the same lines of the questions that are asked in class. It could be somebody asking something that is well known which can be easily resolved with a simple google search. Or it could be a question that does not belong on that particular thread, kinda like asking an english literature question in a linear algebra course.

To summarize please, please, please, for the sake of the world, try to solve the problem on your own and if you are not able to, after exhausting more than one resource, formulate a well thought of, well placed question.

Steps to make an existing JNDI HornetQ service as HA?

Is this an example of a good or bad question? This is neither and is actually a horrible question! The asker is requesting the answerer to literally give them all the steps to accomplish the task. This shows no effort on the asker end and is asking a lot from the answerer. Remember these are people too and while they are kind enough to donate some time and resources I don’t think they would be too happy to be doing your job for you. As a result this question still has no answers and it was asked 1 year and 8 months ago from today’s date.

Configure gradle.properties android.enableAapt=false on travis yml file for android app

This is obviously a good question because we just talked about a bad one. This question is precise and also not a huge problem that would require the answerer to dedicate a lot of time and effort to solve. The questions specifically states what they are looking for and in the question body shows effort in their own attempts at solving the issue. They also have included code to further support their question. This question was answered in about 4 days and it was the correct solution and now both the asker and answerer are happy.

Please ask smart, well thought of, legible questions and the world will thank you for it.