from Hacker News

I want to improve my question asking skill. What advice would you give to me?

by Yuvrajv5 on 4/30/21, 2:37 PM with 5 comments

• by CharleFKane on 4/30/21, 3:52 PM

  Can you give us some context here?

  For example, are you doing front-line tech support and looking to ask better questions of your L2s?

  Are you doing dev work, and looking to ask better questions of more experienced developers?

  In general, one of my biggest frustrations when people ask questions is: they aren't clear about what question they are asking, or what they are looking for. If you can, boil your question down to one sentence: "Can you tell me what the syntax for (thing X) is?"

  Also, in my experience, people get a warm and fuzzy feeling when you ask a question AND say something like "I've read the documentation, I've checked DuckDuckGo, I've checked our internal Wiki/tech notes/databases, and I've searched StackOverflow, and I can't find anything relevant to this issue." Folks will go a little (or a lot) further for you if you show them you've done your homework first.

• by x14km2d on 4/30/21, 3:12 PM

  How To Ask Questions The Smart Way: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

• by PaulHoule on 4/30/21, 2:50 PM

  What kind of question would you like to be able to ask better?

  How would you know you got a good answer?

• by Borrible on 4/30/21, 6:01 PM

  What do you want to achieve with your questions?

  How do you know you improved?

  Why should one answer?

• by gjvc on 4/30/21, 2:56 PM

  Ask open-ended questions.