SMART WAYS to ASK

06 Sep 2024

---

SMART WAY

Did you know you can die by asking questions? Seriously, if you ask a question without thinking to the wrong person, there is a chance that person will kill you. So, don’t be killed by asking questions, that’s a dumb way to die. Especially us, engineering students. Asking is the number one way of learning. The path we are taking will be full of confusion and questions. So here is the link for an example about a SMART way to ask.

It’s asking how to add pictures in README.md in Git Hub. Yep, that’s it. It’s easy to understand and you cannot possibly misinterpret it. The question was explicit and not open-minded. Explicit questions get explicit answers, and that is what the person got. The person received many different ways to tackle his problem and all of them can work in his favor.

DUMB WAY

This link is an example of how to not ask a question. The user is asking to fix a ‘leak’ in their code because the response time of “respondDecisionTaskCompleted” gets slower and slower every redeploy. This question was hard to understand because it only talked about their output problem nothing else. There was no code given, they didn’t explain how they did their code, and they basically gave nothing, expecting an answer to a question that can only be answered if the code was given. Over 7 years and 1000+ views, still no answer to this day.

SMART vs DUMB

The SMART question has many different ways to solve the problem. It was easy to understand. It is explicit enough that the answers are also explicit. The not-so-SMART question got nothing. The question was vague. It asked for suggestions but never gave the code. A question regarding modifying a code but never giving the code is not a SMART way to ask. So, always be explicit with your questions and always share the code if you want suggestions about how to fix your code.