You might be wondering why I spelt Loser wrong in the title. If you are wondering, the answer is yes, I spelt it wrong on purpose. It is a term that is relatable to what I am explaining in the next paragraphs. Or maybe, you weren’t wondering at all and did not care. Anyway, Luser is someone who doesn’t ask a “smart” question to higher level hackers or coders because they basically waste time on answering this Luser’s question that could have easily been found in some source. It is spelt Luser because you are a user and when you put loser and user together, it makes Luser. What is a smart question? It is not a stupid question. I have met some smart people in my lifetime, but they ask stupid questions. A stupid question could either be worded very poorly or the answer can be simply found on some type of source available to the user. I read this website article called How To Ask Questions The Right Way and I definitely feel like I leveled up in the coding world. This feeling I have after retaining this information proves how important it is for smart software engineers to ask “smart” questions. If you put a flyer up and someone comes up to you to ask when the event is, then you would either look at them like they’re a Luser or get irritated because it’s right in front of their face. This is the same concept with asking questions towards higher level hackers/coders. They have bigger fish to fry in their real world and they don’t like to waste their time answering super simple questions that can be found elsewhere.
In this website of StackOverflow, it shows a list of questions asked by people from all over. Using what I learned in the previous link I talked about, there are ways to make sure you are asking a smart question. Those ways are asking yourself questions like can the answer be found by searching on the web, the manual, or FAQ. Then if all of those can’t find the answer you are looking for, now it is time to decide which forum you will put your question under. You want your question in a forum where it is relevant and on-topic otherwise it can be disregarded. Lastly, you want to use specific headers. A cry for help isn’t really a good header because almost everyone on that forum is also crying out for help. I found this example of a not smart question. I ruled it as not smart because the header could have been more informative and it wasn’t very specific on what type of help was needed. The body of the question was a good description of the problem and what environment it was on, but it didn’t specify what he did to search it before asking or the steps he took to break down the question. This question got 4 answers, but they all were not the same so I feel like it would be hard for someone to know who is correct. Then I found a smart question. It has a detailed header and shows what type of problem the user is facing. For the body of the question, he states the source codes he’s found before asking the question and also writes out the code for people to see. Then, the user asked how to fix it with the code before it and stated the problem. I think the user could have stated what environment, but he got most of the pointers down on how to ask a good question. This got 3 responses and the answers include example code along with what environment it was tested on.
From comparing these different questions and responses, I feel like the way you ask something shows you what type of answer you will get back. Therefore, I stand by what I said about how it is super important for smart software engineers to ask smart questions. I feel like even if you aren’t a “smart” software engineer, you can still manage to act smart by making your question seem unbelievably complicated by following the steps listed in the link. I personally think that I have learned something valuable because everyone is bound to have to ask a question no matter what level, but it is the way you ask something that makes a big difference professionally. I think it is good to start beneficial habits now rather than being lazy and not know how to later in my professional career. My old elementary school teacher always told me that if you ask a stupid question, then you’re going to get a stupid answer back. Never in a million years would I have thought that it would carry into my major.