There's No Such Thing As A Stupid Question, Right?

27 Jan 2022

What is a stupid question?

The greatest resource in the modern era hands down is the Internet, it’s an amazing tool to have and we are extremely privileged to have access to all this information. However when we are in need of some help and decide to reach out to strangers over the Internet, as much as our parents have told us to not speak to them, they are also a helpful resource to have! Stack Exchange in particular is my go-to website to seek out advise and solutions to my programming endeavors, because there is a certain point in my brain where my sanity levels are through the roof and I just need to know why my code isn’t working! 9/10 times I am able to get the solution to my problem, but that one other time that I am unable to find it is because:

  1. I worded my question incorrectly
  2. Someone else worded their question incorrectly
  3. I'm looking in the wrong place
  4. There is no solution

The last two reasons are obviously something that I can’t control, because no one has sat down and taken the time to answer said question. But the first two reasons, are something so menial and small that ends up making a huge difference. Something as simple as asking the right question goes a long long way. And the first two reasons listed are the deciding factor if I find the solution I need and am able to sleep peacefully at night, or I frustratedly try to hammer out a solution from my own brain power without any sor tof direction. Communication is such a basic human skill that everyone should know how to do. I grew up as a very shy and closed off person who only conversed with close family, I couldn’t even order my own food at restaurants because I was so shy. But as I grew older I began to come out of my shell and develop my communication skills through making friends, participating in extra curricular, and even my part time jobs. I look back at my younger self that think how differently my life up until now would have been if I didn’t develop basic communication skills. I would probably be lost in class if I didn’t ask questions, I would probably be eating the food that my mom ordered me at restaurants, and I would probably be a generally less productive person. The deciding factor of getting assistance in areas outside of programming as well is asking the right questions.

Prior to reading Eric Raymond’s Guidelines that outlines the best practices for effective communication with other developers or professionals who may or may not have the answer to solve all of your problems, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a “Stupid Programming Question”. It’s not exactly worded like that in the guidelines, but in my head there was no such thing because everyone who worked with tech knew how to ask the right questions the right way, right? It’s so simple, so everyone could do it right? WRONG

An example of the Not So Smart Way to ask a question is something I found hilariously through a Quora post. To summarize this question, the user is asking for help on how to get his “simple” program to work, print “Hello World!” into the console. He provided: the source code, console error messages, and the word “erroneously” in the title question. There are many things wrong with the Stack Overflow question post.

  1. They hand wrote the source code
  2. They described their attempt to use the Clang compiler as "making my computer beep a lot!"
  3. They said "To be honest, I don't really know what any of these error message mean."

But above all they didn’t ask the right questions in the right manner in order to get an effective solution.

Result of stupid questions

This person unfortunately got mocked by many people in the comment section, and for good reason in my opinion. While they were correct in provided the error messages they were receiving, the handwritten source code was something that they couldn’t recover from. However looking beyond that they were unclear in their thought process of trying to resolve the issue, and made it difficult for others with the same issue come to a resolution. If I were to put myself into the shoes of someone with this exact issue, I would probably never find it under a name like “Why is this program erroneously rejected by three C++ compilers?”. Along with these issues, the user was asking the wrong questions. If they didn’t know what the error message meant then they could’ve asked that as a question or even do some research and link their article in the post. This post overall is the epitome of the “Not So Smart Way” to ask for help.

How to Ask the Right Questions

On a different note, this is what I envision as “The Smart Way” to ask for help that correctly conforms to the guidelines Raymond’s article outlined. This user is trying to create an object of fruits that keeps track of how many fruits appear in an array, the user:


In exchange for this well put together post the user was able to receive detailed feedback and specific steps on what to try next. By organizing the post in sections with labels, anyone looking at it would be able to identify what the issue is and what the user has tried in order to fix it. A much better comment section that doesn’t involve mockery of any kind.