What’s the importance of asking smart questions when it comes to software engineering? By asking a smart question, you will be more likely to get an answer that will help you. By asking a bad question, you will most likely get an unsatisfactory answer. In the following examples you will see a smart question and a bad question. By comparing these two, you will be able to see the importance of asking a smart question.
In the first example, the user asked “how to convert text into string in javascript?”. The user provided which application he was using, so others can understand what he’s dealing with. The user also explained exactly what his situation was. In this example he was getting data encoded in base64.His program was outputting the data in text format instead of a string. The user also provided his code for the program so others can see what parts may be wrong. By providing as much detail as possible he was able to get help from another user that suggested he atob() method.
In this next example, a different user asked “how to check whether there is difference in two array in javascript?”. The user did provide some code, and he specifically asked for the result for true or false, but used a .length method to return an integer at the end of his code. By doing this other users didn’t quite understand what he was looking for and instead more questions were brought up. The user did not provide code for the function that was being called and therefore others requested the code because it seemed like the problem was with the code iteslf. This user was not able to find a solution on this forum and instead got redirected to a previous existing forum which was almost the same exact problem.
As you can see from the two examples, asking a smart question is the more efficient thing to do. By asking a smart question you can get a direct answer to your question. By asking a bad question more questions were provided than answers. The key to getting the answer you want would be to provide all the necessary information and post what you have tried already. By doing this you will most likely get an answer that will benefit you. So, the importance of asking a smart question is that you don’t waste anybody’s time and you will most likely get an answer to your problem.