5 Tips For Asking Smart Questions At Work
Asking questions is a common aspect of many professionals’ daily tasks. Questioning is a skill that can be honed to make conversations more productive. American novelist, Thomas Berger said, “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”
Here are 5 pointers on how to ask intelligent questions at work and as a result, get much better answers:
1. Check If Question Is Already Answered
See if you can find the answer to your question by consulting existing resources, like documentation and Q&A sites. Most questions are not fundamentally new and many of the systems are usually documented. Getting answers to your questions without blocking on the availability of your coworkers is a vital skill. Even if you don’t find the answer, you may learn something (such as what doesn’t work) that can help make your question easier to answer.
2. Don’t Ask To Ask, Just Ask
If you have a question and are using an asynchronous channel, ask it in your original post. This will help people get you answers faster because they don’t have to be online and focusing on the conversation at the same time as you.
Examples of how not to ask questions in asynchronous channels:
- “I have a question about X technology.”
- “Does anyone here have experience with Y?”
To encourage asynchronous responses, rephrase questions as follows:
- “Hey community, I’m working with X and trying to do Y, but am receiving Z. I have tried A and my environment is B. Does anyone have an idea as to what is going on?”
- “Hi folks, I am getting started with X. Does anyone have some resources I can review?”
- “Hi All, I am trying to do Y and am looking into X. Does anyone have any impressions of using it?”
If you need to speak with someone live, Don’t Ask to Ask, Just Ask!
3. Choose Right Audience And Place
- If you have a question about publicly available information or services, such as widely used open source software, open public forums are typically the best location to ask it.
- Check the documentation for contact and support information if you have an issue with a specific system or component.
- For general guidance or troubleshooting, you may want to turn to the community-supported forums first. If someone has asked the question already, there is a good chance that you can find the answer there.
- If you’re the first to ask a question, make sure your query and answers are accessible to others who might be looking later.
- If you ask a question in numerous places, please specify where it is cross-posted so that multiple people don’t spend time answering your question in different places. Update all of the other locations you asked the question if you receive a response in one place.
- Edit the primary question if you need to add more information to an existing question that isn’t a basic response. Consider the following scenario: you have a query, and someone replies, “Can you provide the specific error you’re getting?” A great response comment is “I’ve edited my question to include the stack trace”
✅ If your team does not know the answer to a problem, and you find the answer through another method, instruct your team. Tell them what the problem was and what the solution is. It trains them and makes you look good at review time.
4. Ask Detailed Question
The process of narrowing down exactly where the problem is happening can often enable you to solve the problem yourself.
- You can use SSCCE technique — Short, Self Contained, Correct, Example.
- Include information on how other individuals can reproduce the issue.
- Include all necessary data and provide comprehensive context.
- When you ask “how do I do X”, please also describe “why I want to do X” because, while you might have arrived at X as the way to solve a particular part of your problem, there might be a better way to solve the overall problem that doesn’t involve doing X at all.
- If you’re trying to troubleshoot a failure of some kind, be specific about the error that you’re getting; don’t just say “it doesn’t work”.
5. Format Question For Legibility
People are more likely to read questions that are easy to read. If you have the option, use tools to help you format your question, such as Markdown for easy reading.
- Use blank lines to separate paragraphs or other text elements.
- Mark up code blocks and use italics/quotes to format certain words within a typical sentence.
- Omit unnecessary text like information that aren’t relevant to the problem.
- In case of multiple similar error messages, paste in just one example of failure rather than several of them.
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