In the book titled How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, by Eric Raymond, the author does a great job of helping new software engineers learn the art of asking smart programming questions to get answers from programming websites in an efficient manner. The author stresses that before submitting a question for help on programming websites like Stack Overflow, the person submitting the question must first do as much homework as possible to find the answer on their own and then that they did the proper homework in their question and make it concise. If, in the author’s eyes, the person submitting the question proves they have not put in the proper effort to find the answer, the question posed to the programming community will be viewed as a “stupid” question.
For example, a “stupid” question I noticed on Stack Overflow is “Why are there different bean management annotations”. In this case, the author would say this question can be first researched online to find the answer through websites like Google. In fact, in the programming community, they have a humorous acronym for this type of question, called “STFW” (Search The F***ing Web!). The smart way is to not ask this question because you should have already done your homework. The response to this question is very intelligent, as the person goes into extraordinary detail and adds additional interesting information as to why it is different.
I learned not to ask questions that could be answered simply by searching the web. I need to put a certain amount of effort in finding the answer to the question before I even ask it.Then if I am still confused or can’t find an answer I would ask and say what I’ve done to get to this point. I am also able to identify “smart” from “stupid” questions. Overall, the popular phrase “There’s no such thing as a dumb question”, returns false!