There's No Such Thing as a Stupid Question—Or Is There?
25 Jan 2018We’ve heard it in nearly all of our classes: “there’s no such thing as a stupid question”, or “you should ask questions now because chances are, several other students have the same questions.”
But come on. You don’t actually that, do you?
I mean, I remember back in elementary school (and even in college sadly) hearing that whinnying student ask, “what’s the point of learning…” insert difficult topic here. Or even worse. Ask questions they could have found answers to in an assignment, course lectures, or even Google, gasp!
As software engineers, we’re sort of forced to desperately resort to looking through textbooks and sadly revisiting the same top ten google searched sites for the umpteenth time in an effort to debug our nonfunctioning codes. It’s enough to make any student go crazy!!!
I mean, if you don’t become a “Google expert” during your college years as a software engineer then you’re doing something terribly wrong. Or, you’re a genius and have never had to look for help ‘cause you’re so awesome and all! Gah! Lucky you! But for the rest of us, there are times where we need to look to the software engineering community for guidance. And ya know, some software engineers can be downright brutal–to some and incredibly helpful to others.
For example, take a look at this question: Cringe!
Yeah, I mean really?! This information could have totally been obtained through a 10 second Google search! Poor fella! He just doesn’t know any better. Meanwhile compare the above question to this one: Wow!
You can definitely see the contrast in the positive versus negative responses from the software engineering community from both questions. The first, provoked a lot of downvotes as it was not a “smart” question. While the other, was something that got developers “excited” to answer the question.
So the next time you ask a question to your fellow colleagues be sure that it’s something that you’ve genuinely took some time to research for yourself and something that is thought provoking.