Since the beginning of Stack Overflow, there have been many questions asks. Some of them were asked the smart way and the others asked in the stupid way. The smart way of asking a question includes researching the problem before asking the question, providing a sufficient amount of information in the question, and being free of grammatical and spelling errors. As long as you follow that criteria you’ll be asking a smart question and not a stupid one.
An example of a smart question from Stack Overflow is “Spring Boot - Cannot determine embedded database driver class for database type NONE”. From the title of the question you can get a clear understanding of what technology they’re asking for help with and what they’re having a problem with. Any developer who reads this can instantly recognize the problem the user is having and can think of a general answer before even opening the rest of the question. After opening the question, the user provides stack traces, the code that is causing the error, and the dependencies that they’re using. Once a developer opens the question they don’t have to ask the user to provide context to the question and can reply with just an answer. The user takes this even further where he’s done research and found a question that deals with what he’s trying to achieve, but the answer from that question is causing his error.
Since this user asked his question in the smart way, he was able to get a handful of helpful answers. Almost every single reply to the question was a direct answer, there was no developer that asked for more context because the user provided everything that was needed to determine an answer. Had this user post the question in the stupid way there most likely wouldn’t be as many answers to his question.
An example of a stupid question is “com.sun.xml.ws.spi.db.DatabindingException: Unknown JAXBContext implementation: class org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContext in Weblogic”. Just from looking at the title it’s not a question, it’s just a stack trace. Since the user only provided a stack trace in the title most developers won’t even look at the question. When opening the question the user provides the rest of the stack trace and the file that they think is causing the error. The user also did research some documentation, however I searched for the title in Google and found other questions with the same error in the title that were posted years before. In the other questions with the same title the only responses were the users that asked the question and found a solution. If the poster of this question looked on Stack Overflow first they could’ve potentially found a solution without having to ask a question. If they asked a smart question instead of just posting a stack trace for the title, maybe they could’ve gotten an answer.
After looking through questions on Stack Overflow, I’ve noticed that all of the smart questions that are asked are answered with high quality answers. While looking for stupid questions I noticed that a lot of them were answered, but the quality of the answer varied. There were also lots of questions that were removed as they were too similar to questions that were asked before. Now that I’ve experienced smart and stupid questions, my biggest takeaway from it is researching before asking. A lot of questions could be solved from a simple Google search, whether the answers from documentation or a question that someone else already asked on Stack Overflow.