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I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers. That may be true for adhering to the rules, but it's not enough to get accura
by Bartweiss 10y ago
I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers. That may be true for adhering to the rules, but it's not enough to get accurate answers.
If you have a problem which is at all subtle or complicated, it's frequently necessary to open by saying "I know about X and Y, that's not what I'm asking!" Otherwise, the fastest guns in the west will see the header, skim a few lines, and answer "Just do X!" Or, of course, mark as trivial because "X" is in the documentation.
I've found a lot of these questions when trying to grapple with broken APIs. Someone will go "I want to do this thing, but the method call to do it is broken in these specific ways", and get answered with "Just use the method call in the API, dummy!" Often, it comes with a downvote and they never get another answer.
You can work around this, I succeeded with "This method call is broken in this way, so how do I work around that?" But it's far from obvious, and it means learning to not just write good questions but preempt systematically bad answers.
- acjohnson55 10y ago> I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers. I didn't say either of those things, and I don't think either one is true :) Asking quality questions is a skill, whether that's on SO or elsewhere. I'm just saying it's not rocket science. Perhaps a better workflow could improve things. Almost like a wizard.