How to ask good questions

I was afraid that I would spill the beans on being a fraud who had no idea what he was doing, so I'd pretend that of course we'll use library X to write algorithm Y, but then bring up unnecessary complexity about implementation details.

One significant transition I made as I started to feel valuable and deserving of my position was to stop asking stupid questions and start asking simple questions.

To me, doing research is the lowest hanging fruit with the highest return on investment. From a journalism context, I push students to hit LexisNexis and Google hard before they do interviews. Whenever a student complains that they don't have any interesting questions to ask, or the subject had nothing interesting to say, almost always the problem could have been mitigated with pre-interview research.

The benefits of doing research for interviewing:

- You can learn the boilerplate of the subject, which serves the dual purpose of making you more nimble in interpreting the context of responses and saves you from wasting valuable question time of basic info ("So when did you start directing, Mr. Tarantino?)

- You can learn the current or ongoing controversies of a subject, from which almost all interesting questions arise.

- You find other interesting people to interview.

When your questions are derived from research, you save time by cutting through the boilerplate and any bullshit that might be offered as a response. Furthermore, there's an unquantifiable benefit in increasing respect -- that is, your subject will give you more serious, thoughtful answers because they see that you've put serious, thoughtful effort into understanding them.

You can gain this rapport if you're in a position of authority, or have the chance of multiple interviews. But in cases where you're just another possibly-threatening interrogator, doing your research is an easy and accessible way of increasing your authority, and thus, the quality of answers you receive. It can more than make up for in-person skills, depending on the situation and subject.

Edit: the OP suggests not being so strict on Gogling-before-asking, because she likes to ask basic questions during casual conversation, like over lunch/coffee. I think you can have your cake and eat it too. Sometimes I'll ask questions that I already know the answer to, as an icebreaker. But again, this requires research for the domain knowledge. Ideally, you want your icebreaker questions to be one that you anticipate the person is enthusiastic to answer. While they're saying what you think they'll say, you can spend that time gauging the person's mood and think of segues into other lines of questioning. Of course, once in awhile, they'll respond to your softball basic question with something that you didn't expect...and that in itself leads to potential insights.

That's vague, so let me give an example. Let's say you want to ask, say, why data being sent over a network is chunked at a certain size. Before asking that question, first ask, "why _would_ it be chunked?" You then might start down the road of considering that maybe there a maximum size of data that can be sent over the wire, and dig in from there and answer your own question.

Most of the time, things are the way they are because someone made them that way - you're not discovering new land that nobody has seen before - and that someone probably had a reason. If you try to think about what that reason might be - if you ask "why would this be made to be this way?" - you will often find a way to the answer to your original question on your own without having to ask anyone else.

Often, when learning a new library or abstraction, I ask myself, "how would I have designed this?" Most of the time, either the way I would have designed it is the way it is designed and it's then easy to understand, or it isn't and the difference between how I would have designed it and how it was designed points directly at something I hadn't considered or been aware of, giving me a place to start understanding.

Critical thinking and careful investigation are incredibly valuable skills that can push you ahead by leaps and bounds without needing anyone else to help you. Those skills do take time to develop, though.

To ask a good question you have to know your audience! This includes asking a teacher, coworker, boss, a spouse and even a computer or cloud of computers such as Google. You wouldn't want to ask or phrase the same questions that you ask Google that you ask your teacher (believe me I have googled things that are proper english and seem benign yet return horrible and embarrassing results... on the other hand I have googled pretty embarrassing things that I would never ask a human... usually medical).

Now the above probably seems pretty obvious to HNers but believe me it is surprising how globally it is not.

Also as the article does mention you do need to know who to talk to first but you also need to figure out who to ask followup questions.

I went to GaTech late 90s to early 2000s and there was a teacher there named Jim Greenlee (who for all extensive purposes was a bastard albeit effective bastard). Jim Greenlee was very much of the opinion that "human intervention should be almost always the last resort" and that it is better to learn and fail by doing.

Now I don't entirely agree with Jim but I have to say given the way things are improving with computers you really should learn how to ask them questions and probably first since they are increasingly becoming more effective at answering them.

We live in a time where you need to be effective with interfacing with both computers and humans.... Know your audience... and probably ask the computer first since they don't seem to have feelings... yet.

My biggest weakness/opportunity for growth is my unwillingness to ask for help/ask questions. This strategy is key to me trying to save face and it's a good way to learn more about my team's expertise.

> Why does rkt store container images differently from Docker? ... The answer I got was super super helpful

IMO you'd have gotten a satisfactory answer just by virtue of the fact that you're posing a question about a difference from a competitive software product. And in this case it's the market leader by far. Whenever someone poses a difference in behavior or performance/specifications between two similar/compatible software packages it very often inspires a lot of interest.

Aside: I think that Julia's blog posts or at least this one in particular is a great highlight of female participation in software development. Not that men don't post stuff like this on occasion. But it seems like the focus is often more content regarding technical matters than social ones.

> The more I do this, the more comfortable I feel asking someone to clarify. in fact, if someone doesn’t ask me for clarifications when I’m explaining something, I worry that they’re not really listening!

I think this is really powerful. I believe high skilled professionals tend to have a clear idea of they know and what they don't know.

It is regularly so hostile and rules lawyerly that I have to collect everything I know about the problem into the post, and pre-empt every objection with an existing fact.

And, once I do that, I'm almost always close enough to the solution that I don't need to press "post." Just typing what I know into the Stack Overflow window, and imagining all the objections to the question, structures my question to the point of finding the answer!

This question does:

   - Identify terms you don’t understand 
   - Ask questions where the answer is a fact

   - Do some research  // profile flag user accessed faq
   - Decide who to ask // ^

When your in IT, everyone has questions. They think it's all the same. I don't have any time anymore to fix a or B's computer. Then I have to worry if they are offended.

At my job, there's a junior who constantly annoys me. He starts telling his problem with absolutely useless info and then says what he thinks the solution would be ( he's always way off). I go to him, ask it to show it to me with fiddler or Google console tools and almost always you can see the problem there. It's absolutely B's.

Or he asks a stupid question where the only possible answer is yes, I think he's doing it to show off as smart ( ps. He's obviously not and after 2 years, he still doesn't do much)

God, I hate it