Good questions vs. bad questions

07 Sep 2023

---

Questions can be benefitial or detrimental to your progress of learning. A good question can solve your problem and allow you to not make the mistake in the future. A bad question can leave you more confused than you were in the first place. Stack Overflow is a useful website to allow the community of developers to answer your questions, if you can ask a good one.

Good Question

Here is an example of a good question: How do I exit VIM?. This is a simple questions that asks the community how to exit the text editor VIM. This question is very popular in the developer community because of how many people also ask this question and how unintuitive it is to exit VIM. This is a good question because it is simple and it can be understood what the problem is as well as evidence of the problem. It also is a good question because it was the first of this topic to be asked. When asking a question you want to make sure the question hasn’t already been asked and answered.

Bad Question

Here is an example of a bad question: I got this error in render. This is a terrible question for multiple reasons. One, it is not even asking a question about the code, rather, it is just asking the community to solve his problem. Two, there is no overarching information about what they are doing or what code this is about. These types of questions on Stack Overflow are normally not answered because it is not formed in a good way to where the community can help effectively.

Conclusion

Overall, asking questions correctly is very useful in the world of software development because the community can be a great help because they will have different points of views as well as different backgrounds. In the example of asking a bad question, we can see that nobody had answered the question as well as gave them bad reputation for the bad question. Stack Overflow can be a very useful resource if the questions are asked correctly.