How to get useful answers to your questions | Hacker News Reader

How to get useful answers to your questions

jvns.ca

114 pointsingve34 comments

Another tip I use a lot: ask just one question per email.

This seems inefficient, and it is, but there's a subset of people with whom I communicate in my industry, and they almost always will only answer one of my questions if I put multiple questions in an email. Even a simple one like:

> Two quick questions for you:

> 1. Do you want this or that?

> 2. Which do you like better, A or B?

Limiting to a single question and then following up with a second question takes longer, but I don't feel rude having to point out the second question that was missed/ignored from my initial email.

I use this tip as well. People don't read... until they do.

This is a bit of a tangent...

My incident reports are a good example of the reverse: giving good answers.

* The first two sentences will explain what happened, the scope of impact, when it was fixed, and a plan of action.

* The next paragraph or two has the important details.

* Everything after is a detailed timeline (down to the minute if that information is available.)

This allows anyone reading the email to read as much as they want without having to read everything.

Effective communication is hard.

I once saw a big company internal webapp that did a dangerous thing. Once it had been misused and the app team was blamed, so there were a bunch of checkboxes at the bottom, including one that said something like "I didn't read this I'm just checking all the boxes and clicking go" and if you clicked that box it would give you an error message.

I've also found that in emails there's a surprisingly large number of people that think "yes" is a valid response to: "Should I do A or B"? They interpret the or like an interpreter and short circuit at A, rather than recognizing that this is asking which should be done.

"Should I do A?, or B?"

I mention the number of questions in a sentence like "I have following 3 questions:" and then write them down as a numbered list. I think this makes it more obvious if an answer is missing. However, if an answer is missing, I just ask that question again (maybe rephrased), without pointing out that a question was missed - "It is not clear to me yet [...]"

It works at least sometimes.

the number of 2 question emails ignored infuriates me! I hate the inefficiency, but have learned to deal with it the same way. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.

Or send them a form with a submit button that works only if both answers are filled in.

Great point. I often find myself frustrated when someone only answers one of my two (very clearly laid out) questions. Should definitely make more of a point of keeping it to one at a time.

A similar thing happens in online discussions where arguments are not uncommon.

If you argue with someone and point out all the ways in which and why they are are wrong, they are free to counteract just one of your points and maybe "strawman" it. But if you just put your single best argument forward it is much more difficult to dismiss.

So whether questions, or arguments, it best to start with just one.

It annoys the crap out of me when people ask questions that indicate lack of understanding. In the past I would tend to try to give context but people often (usually) think that you’re either being condescending or that you’re wasting their time and why won’t you just tell them the information they need.

You have to be very careful with techniques like the author suggests. For example, the “only ask yes/no” questions. It is really easy to come across as an asshole that way.

I worked at Microsoft years ago and they taught similar techniques as “precision questioning”. It is frequently a humiliating experience for the person being questioned.

Now, when someone asks me a bad question, I usually just ask “what’s the question behind the question” or “what are you trying to accomplish”. Then I can easily provide the right amount of information if I know it.

[edit] fixed autocorrect error

I did this earlier this week. I was Slacking someone about a nuanced process they work with. I asked a couple of technical questions, and got some technical answers. I was MOSTLY certain I knew what was what - but I ended it with a Yes/No question, and he gave me a "Yes".

It is entirely possible there is additional information I should know, and he might have given a better answer if he had sought to understand my problem - but I'm not concerned about that!

I've found that the problem with getting questions answered usually doesn't come down to poorly phrasing the question or whatever, it's when I write a detailed and high quality question and people just don't read it at all, instead choosing to just answer with some canned response to some other question because they didn't bother to read mine.

It's like that beavis and butthead episode.

Customer: I'm trying to ask a very simple question here, are your shakes made from shake mix or from ice cream and milk!?

Butthead: We have vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OQUaguZawJQ

What does a "detailed and high quality question" look like?

If it's more than a few sentences I'm not surprised people are giving you canned responses, because it's too long.

> My favourite tactic is to ask a yes/no question.

Depending on culture and hierarchy that can be a bad idea.

> do you need to scale up by hand?

In many places that is not a question, but just a rhetoric question that means 'doing it by hand is wrong'

Open questions also allow to find concerns that I do not know about. Even asking 'how do you decide how to scale' may highlight hidden reason for that manual scaling.

> state your current understanding

I use this one a lot and it's very good to find when I may have misinterpret answers.

> be willing to interrupt

Quite cultural, depending who you are talking to, people will avoid talking to you all together.

> take a minute to think

If you find yourself entitled to interrupt people but ask others to wait for you that seems problematic.

I guess that is a cultural thing. But I always get the best results by adapting to the other person preferred way of communication instead of imposing mine. My job requires to talk with people in different positions and in different countries, thou. Maybe it's different if you just talk with developers and with a very similar profile.

>> be willing to interrupt > Quite cultural, depending who you are talking to, people will avoid talking to you all together.

It can be done in various ways I guess. One thing I've been doing for some time now is to not directly interrupt but just start making "noise". Like for example going "Mhhh", accompanied by a "thinking gesture" and maybe murmuring "interesting" or some such.

Some people are able to pick up on those things and will give you an opening to then actually ask your question or reply. Thus it feels way less like interrupting, especially as it can give the other person a chance to finish the immediate thought but then let you "interrupt".

Some people don't pick up on this though and you might need to interrupt but what I try first is to write down what I wanted to say. Some people have a way of just talking and talking and jumping from one topic or area of a topic to another without so much as taking a breath. I make a point of then going through my list and proclaiming that I will go back to the first point they made, then the second one etc. Sometimes that helps.

Sometimes it doesn't and I literally have to stop them then and there and actually saying it like that too "Sure that's a great topic but let's stay focused, we were gonna discuss X".

> In many places that is not a question, but just a rhetoric question that means 'doing it by hand is wrong'

I hate it when people psychanalyse my question to find hidden meanings instead of giving a straight yes/no/dunno answer. Like "What let you to ask this question? I assume you actually want to ask B." Then they give you a long speech on completely irrelevant or obvious facts.

> Depending on culture and hierarchy that can be a bad idea.

Could you please elaborate on this? I’ve never been in a situation/environment like that, I don’t think, and I’m quite curious about what to look out for.

FTA> don’t accept responses that don’t answer your question

You can do that twice, after the person you're talking to tires.

One of my helpful questions when people have hard time to measure something, I ask with power of 10. For example

Me:"how long to have an approval for project X?"

X:"Dunno, really, tough question..."

Me:"A day ? Ten day, 100 days"

X "no, not 100 days, yeah more like 50"...

Somehow it helps people to think about it even when they don't want to answer.

People can determine order of magnitude much easier than giving a more specific timeline.

For support or feature requests, I use this progression:

    - Minutes
    - Hours
    - Days
    - Sprints (2 weeks)
    - Quarters

It's a lot less work for people to figure out what category their request belongs in.

Note: In my company, next quarter means planned for next quarter, not ignore indefinitely.

To me, this is similar to the same concept of the paradox of choose. Ask someone where they want to eat, and there are too many options too choose from, and they are also thinking about what you may want to eat as well. Provide them 3 options to choose from, and it gets the decision moving.

Not mentioned is Cunningham's Law. It works really well:

"the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#"Cunningham's_..."

I think it's also important to take into account the knowledge level of the person you're asking the question to. I often find, for example, that by the time I need to contact some sort of support person for an online or business transaction, I've exhausted most things they're generally used to, and tend to have a reasonably complex issue. You would think that "stating your understanding" would work well there, as it would get you past rehashing all the things you've already tried, but I find it usually backfires. More often it just throws the person off and you end up getting confusion and/or guesses presented as fact.

So I guess I would generalize that step, so it's more like, "establish both parties' understanding," which you can do by getting into your own understanding more gradually, and gauging the responses.

If it's phone support they might have a call-length metric. Stringing you along, but maybe not too much, might be useful to them!?

I hate this too, fwiw.

Though one time I was caught out on a forum: I said I'd 'turned it off and on again, lol!1one' and the respondent was like 'no you have to restart'. And that was the day I learnt Windows restart does something different to power-cycling.

Issue still outstanding, but I did make the Jackie Chan 'wth' meme face, and whatever SE board voted to close it without a solution for whatever rubbish reason.

Restart definitely does something different than a forced power cycle, if that's what you mean, but I believe shutdown and then boot up is nearly equivalent to restart. Are you saying it's not? Do you have more detail on the difference?

Restart doesn't give the electrons time to cool.

If posting your question where a subject will be used (email, forums, reddit, etc), don't just make the subject "need help!". You've made it luck of the draw who clicks through. "Need help with React Router" will likely improve the quality of people who click through.

Similarly, on chat programs, don't PM people. Please! If you have a general technical/business/etc question, a channel is a far better venue: everyone in the channel can be a candidate to answer. You increase the odds of someone being available to answer. Your answer goes into the search history and possibly helps other people who currently have the same question but are afraid to ask. It's also really unfair to put all of the onus onto one person via PM. If the person you would have PM'd is able to answer, they can also answer in the channel.

Yes, DMs are for bitching and personal information. Everything else should be in channels.

Edit: even some bitching should be rephrased constructively and put in a public channel!

An issue with questions is that they are not always purely for fact finding. Your answer to a question might also be taken as an indication of approval, or that you will take responsibility for something. People aren't being devious, but just human, and under pressure to get things done.

The answers to many questions are only valid within constraints. And some answers come in the form of estimates and uncertainties rather than a simple yes/no.

If it's something that's going to affect users or safety, I'd like to know that you're not just going to implement my answer without further testing.

So it's perfectly reasonable to answer a question with a few questions:

* What are you trying to do?

* Who needs to know this, and what are they trying to do?

This is critical reading for everyone we hire: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

>In Web forums, do not abuse “smiley” and “HTML” features (when they are present). A smiley or two is usually OK, but colored fancy text tends to make people think you are lame. Seriously overusing smileys and color and fonts will make you come off like a giggly teenage girl, which is not generally a good idea unless you are more interested in sex than answers.

Wow. That's uh...some kinda advice for sure.

I'm not sure if anyone else experiences this but I really can't process all the information in real time. Especially for deeply technical topics, I need a lot of time to think and reflect on what people say, and then my clarifying questions come to mind. I find this is really hard for conversations because it seems like I don't instantly have any questions, but in reality I need time to think about it myself. Maybe that means that writing is a better form of communication for me.

Conningham’s Law still applies even now: the fastest way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer.

Yep. Much more effective than ESR's guide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com