On Asking Questions
Friday Feb 22, 2008
I'll start by saying that I'm sick. And cranky. Ok, so I'm generally considered cranky, but being sick makes me especially so. You have been warned.
I'm on a lot of email aliases. A lot of them. I get, on average, about 300 email messages a day. Maybe more. That's a lot of email. I am also active on several forums, including being the top-poster on the Sun SPOT Forums. We get a fair amount of traffic over there. Not huge, but we have over 700 users, and our statistics page shows an average of around 4.5 posts per day, and 1 new topic per day. Doesn't sound like much, but that's averaged over a long time period.
So I'll get to the point already. It's how questions are asked. While there are no stupid questions, there are questions that are asked in such a way as to appear to be stupid. Most of this flows from an excellent web posting on the subject entitled simply "Getting Answers." It gives excellent concrete examples of how to ask effective questions in order to get good answers.
Let me give you an example. A user comes on our forums and says "My Sun SPOTs don't work." That's obviously a problem we have to deal with, so we post back "Can you please give us some details about what doesn't work?" The answer is "When I plug them in, no driver is loaded, and I can't run any software." Ok, that does sound like a problem. "What Operating system are you running? What version of the Sun SPOT SDK have you installed?" we ask. "I'm running OS/2 Warp and I couldn't get the SDK to install." is the answer. Well, as Jamie Hyneman would say "that's your problem right there."
See, had this poster said in the first place: "I'm trying to communicate with my new Sun SPOTs connected to my OS/2 Warp machine, but I can't even get the SDK to install." We could have taken care of this the first time out by simply answering that the OS isn't supported, and that without installing the SDK, he wouldn't be able to communicate with the Sun SPOTs. Instead, it took a day, and half a dozen postings, to get to the fact that the Sun SPOTs likely work fine, but they cannot be used in the way the user is trying to use them.
So it's all about how the question is asked. Providing enough detail in the question to allow someone to actually answer it in a way that is meaningful and helpful. Asking questions that only require the answerer to ask more questions before he or she can even begin to answer only serves to annoy the person trying to answer. Annoy them enough and they will start to refuse to answer you at all. Or so I've heard.
[ He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered. ]
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