One thing people need to know about is how to ask smart questions. Particularly in my ICS courses, asking smart questions results in a much more effective way of getting an answer. Depending on how you ask a question, you may have answers that either help towards solving your problem or answers that ask you to solve the problem yourself. What differs between the two? The first provides clear concise hints or maybe an answer which you may not have found on previous searches. The second just asks you to search that stuff again because clearly you’re not searching properly. Asking a stupid question is redundant and may only be met with stupid answers. Questions that can be answered by simply looking at a manual or searching the web will be met with answers saying to do just that, RTFM or STFW. It is important to ask smart questions as to not waste the time for those reading it. Smart software engineers do not have the time to spend pondering on a question you’ve just taken a few seconds writing about.
An example of a stupid question would be this Stack Overflow post asking for help creating a Discord bot. The title of the post reads “Discord Bot [Help Needed]”, and requests help for creating a discord bot chat that provides rules for a chat in a message. The poster also provides in the body of their question that they never actually coded a discord bot before and still requires help. They haven’t provided any code, but provided a screenshot of a message they would like to get done. Big red flags can be found in this question. The poster made it clear that they did not previously look up code on how to create this sort of bot, nor does it seem like they attempted any coding to do so. An answer provided informed the poster that no one is going to write the code for the poster, since no effort of creating the code was shown. The responder was kind enough to politely refer the poster to a few sites that can help the poster with the issue, rather than telling them to just simply look it up. A time lengthy response from the responder could have been avoided if the poster had just looked up how to create a discord bot in the first place.
A good example of a smart question comes from this Stack Overflow post. The poster asks how they can have the Discord bot find a discord channel by name/id. The poster provides a snippet of their code in text, and provides the results of that code. They have also referred to other posts trying to solve the same problem they were having. One answer provided a snippet of code that could be attached to the original. The poster found that answer to be useful and thanked the responder. Quick and concise question and answer. No time wasted trying to figure out what exactly the poster is asking for. Although this question could have been technically answered with a “look it up” reply, the poster made it clear that they have attempted to solve the problem, but required further assistance because they were stuck. This makes others more reluctant to bash the person for their failure and gives an incentive to help instead.
A few things I learned from looking at these questions. One thing is that people are more willing to help with your problem if you have shown that you’ve attempted to solve it yourself first. Simply asking for an answer is like asking for none. No one is eagerly willing to do your homework for you. Another thing I learned is that stupid questions take up more time that simply searching for an answer. In the case of the first post, the poster could have simply looked up a guide on how to create a discord bot instead of directly asking the Stack Overflow Community on how to create one. The latter requests unnecessary man power and time. Overall, the main thing I gained from this is to not be a hindrance to others. Instead, show that you’ve tried to combat the task, and really only ask when the answer is beyond the reach of your knowledge.