How not to ask a question
An interesting collection of post from the blog The Old New Thing in which Eric Lippert's blog summarizes into a nice set of bullet points:
- Use a difficult or meaningless subject line.
- Ask a grammatically unclear question.
- Forget to actually ask a question (this is a personal favo[u]rite of mine; back when I was working on scripting I would practically daily get an email consisting of a stack trace and a crash report, with no indication whatsoever of what the sender wanted me to do with it. Investigate it? Commiserate? Give career advice?)
- Ask an unanswerable question over and over again.
- phrasing the question in terms of the attempted solution rather than the underlying problem
I will be more careful when asking questions to follow these sets of "Do Not" rules. There have been a few customers who would give me a complex, difficult to read/understand contract that spells out their services, expectations, and rules. I would then have to decipher a set of business rules out of them.
I then come to a situation where I would ask a large set of questions via email and never hear a response. Like I sent the question to a large festering black hole, expecting never to hear anything about it. One of these bullet points might have been the problem, or they just like ignoring the difficult to answer questions. Anyway, what I usually end up doing after complaining to my managers is just guess what they were hoping for. If they have a problem with it later:
1) I already asked, so don't blame me for overages in the estimates hours and
2) It would only take a few seconds to fix in the code (hopefully).
No comments:
Post a Comment