Asking good questions is a super important skill when writing software. I’ve gotten way better at it over the years (to the extent that it’s something my coworkers comment on a lot). Here are a few guidelines that have worked well for me!
Also: Answering questions well
How to ask good questions
Our goal is going to be to ask questions about technical concepts that are easy to answer. I often have somebody with me who has a bunch of knowledge that I’d like to know too, but they don’t always know exactly how to explain it to me in the best way.
If I ask a good series of questions, then I can help the person explain what they know to me efficiently and guide them to telling me the stuff I’m interested in knowing. So let’s talk about how to do that!
- State what you understand about the subject so far
- Ask “is that right?”
.. Ask questions where the answer is a fact
A lot of the questions I have start out kind of vague, like “How do SQL joins work?”. That question isn’t awesome, because there are a lot of different parts of how joins work! How is the person even supposed to know what I’m interested in learning?
.. Being able to stop someone and say “hey, what does that mean?” is a super important skill. I think of it as being one of the properties of a confident engineer and an awesome thing to grow into. I see a lot of senior engineers who frequently ask for clarifications – I think when you’re more confident in your skills, this gets easier.
.. in fact, if someone doesn’t ask me for clarifications when I’m explaining something, I worry that they’re not really listening!
.. This also creates space for the question answerer to admit when they’ve reached the end of their knowledge! Very frequently when I’m asking someone questions, I’ll ask something that they don’t know. People I ask are usually really good at saying “nope, I don’t know that!”