Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by edomyrots 265 days ago
This kind of ettiquete should be taught in school. - How to write an email - How to ask someone to meet you in person/online - How to ask a question
2 comments

This should be taught by parents
I feel lucky that I was growing in my craft when StackOverflow was still a good place to ask questions. A few poorly asked questions and you see how much back and forth is needed to tease details out or often you just don't get adequate answers. Provide plenty of context. Explain what you've tried and explicitly what isn't working about it. Reference specific error messages or numbers. It got to the point where I was researching in order to form a good question which often led to finding my own answer.

The place I'm at now is one of the worst I've ever experienced for being asked questions. No one has time or energy to write out a thoughtful question with context. It's always "let's hop on a call and discuss." No. I don't want to hop on a call with you while you fumble to even articulate the problem. Write things down first so you actually understand the problem and a specific ask for me. Multiple times on a current project one of my colleagues was trying to troubleshoot an Azure service. I'd give him something to try or look into and his response was always a simple "didn't work". Didn't matter how many times I prompted him to be more specific. "What didn't work? Are you seeing error messages? Did anything change?" It's like pulling teeth and is a source of a lot of frustration.