
Why Won't You Answer My Question? - rionmonster
http://rion.io/2017/02/09/why-wont-you-answer-my-question/
======
drblast
Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose.

I'm constantly baffled by bug reports I receive. From other people who work at
my company. A tech company. A large one. You've heard of it.

We log every operation in our API. I cache errors, and the API returns a JSON
formatted error with a GUID that correlates to the operation that failed, so
if I have a GUID I can look at exactly what happened every step of the way,
and what went wrong, in the logs.

Most of the time, all I need to fix a bug or tell you why you're having a
problem is the GUID from the error message. You don't even need to ASK a
question. I log _stack traces_ of any exceptions that occur so our logs are
almost as good as running the software through a debugger.

The bug reports I'd expect and want?

    
    
      "Hey, I got this error message that I copy/pasted below...can you tell me what's going on?"
    
      <two line error message>
    

I have NEVER gotten that bug report. The bug reports I get?

    
    
      "Hey I think your system is down."
    
      "Is something wrong with your system?"
    
      "I tried to do something and got an error. Is something wrong? No, I don't know what the error was."
    
      "We're getting this weird error when we try X. I dunno, it was just weird. It works now though."
    
      "I think the data you're returning is wrong."
    

Or my favorite:

"Hey, we've been discussing this issue we've had with <upstream system> that
depends on your system. We assumed your system has been down for the last
couple of days and have been blaming your team in email threads you're not on
because <upstream system> isn't working. Nobody told you or your team. When is
your system going to be fixed? No we don't have any examples or any record of
error messages from your system."

(Resolution: problem is bug in <upstream system>)

~~~
tambourine_man
Oh god yes. I don't understand why it's so hard for people to report a bug.

I don't think other fields suffer from this as much.

No one goes to the doctor and says:

    
    
      - I don't feel good 
      - What are your symptoms?
      - I don't know, I just feel bad.
    

It's usually in the form of: "I have a sore throats and running a fever, it
began x days ago", etc

What is it about computers that makes people throw their hands in air and say,
I don't know, I just doesn't work.

They are smart people, and yet it's beyond them to think that, in order to fix
it, the other person must at least know what's wrong in the first place.

~~~
grkvlt
One thing that is also frustrating is apparently intelligent people (even
software engineers, while writing code) who see a stack trace and their mind
goes blank. They then send you an error report saying 'I set X to 4 in my code
and got this exception, here is the stack trace - what's wrong, and how do I
fix it?' followed by something like:

    
    
        WrongNumberException: Please use the
        number three instead of four when
        setting x
          io.number.NumberChecker.java:123
    

Of course many error messages are completely inscrutable, but it seems nobody
reads any of them, parsing it as 'computer says complicated thing' or
similar...?

~~~
mfukar
Not to exclude the X factor, but presentation matters. I think vomiting
exceptions, stack traces, or error codes in text makes people not care. Not
just a layman, but an expert, too.

~~~
beobab
This is very true. A verbose log is incredibly helpful to someone who can read
them, but if you are unfamiliar with the format, or find bits that you cannot
interpret, then it all starts to look like noise.

It reminds me of my cousin, who is a ranger in a national park, when she says
something like: "Oh, the deer have been here!" whilst pointing to a patch of
ground which looks totally indistinguishable from all the other patches of
ground which presumably do not show traces of deer.

Your brain gets trained to see subtle changes only after several exposures to
meaning. Joel Spolsky had a similar scenario where the bread making machines
looked clean to a trained eye, but not to an untrained one.

------
ColinWright
This problem of people asking bad questions has been around a long time. A
really long time.

Here's a resource to deal with it:

[https://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html](https://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html)

Here's another, somewhat harsher version that preceded that:

[http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-
questions.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

These were discussed on the C2 wiki a _long_ time ago:

[http://wiki.c2.com/?HowToAskQuestionsTheSmartWay](http://wiki.c2.com/?HowToAskQuestionsTheSmartWay)

But the issues remain - people are sometimes lazy, sometimes asses, sometimes
jerks, and often suffer from learned helplessness.[0] In each case, answering
their question is not always the right thing to do.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness)

~~~
sverige
I admire anyone who has the patience to answer questions on places like Stack
Overflow or mailing lists. I don't have that particular helping gene. I'll
help you move, though.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I had when I was a teenager; I'd spend endless hours explaining C++ to people
on Internet forums. It was a kind of pastime for me.

Somehow, I've lost most of that "helping gene" over the years. I'll still
happily explain things to people, but I don't look for occasions to explain
stuff on purpose anymore.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
For me it has a few factors: I learn, memorize, and internalize through
argument and learning to explain things to others. Eventually my skill ceiling
rises in a topic where this no longer applies much. But, if I can spend 5
seconds to save someone 5 hours, I'm likely to help unless I _thoroughly_
dislike the person - it's just too high of a positive impact. With my peers,
I'll accept much worse ratios (e.g. spend 1 hour to save you 2) under the
vague unstated assumption that you'd do the same for me, or it'll help
accomplish our common goal faster. And in the special case of helping people
with research and problem solving skills, it'll sometimes make people less
annoying :)

------
Ralfp
Doing open source in my free time, I've found solace in realizing what is
worse than getting barrage of unresearched, silly, or perhaps bad questions:

Getting no questions at all.

This means that nobody is using your project, and that makes me feel defeated
far more than having person ask me why he uploaded my project's python files
to public_html on his $2 shared hosting, and no app is showing up in his
browser.

~~~
nol13
was so excited to get my first github issue!

------
crispyambulance
... and if you do heed the advice of the OP, and post a well-considered
question on stackoverflow, researched to the best of your ability, you will
often get back a withering dismissal from some asshole who has taken it upon
himself to police against "bad questions".

~~~
mirimir
Yep, and worse, closed as a duplicate to a question that's only vaguely
related, with no relevant answer ;)

------
crispyambulance
What we have here is literally a 21-point checklist that someone needs to go
through before deigning to ask a question so as not to piss off the IT guy.
We've all seen it before, hundreds of times, stackoverflow has made asking a
question into a sacrament, yes, with the same level of sanctimony.

Perhaps that's not working? Perhaps its time to consider other approaches
especially since complaints with such detailed advice for resolution ARE NOT
READ by the people that actually need to read them? How is sharing this on HN
REALLY going to help people ask better questions?

Many tech people fail to understand that having knowledge and giving knowledge
are two distinct things. Just because you know something in great detail and
can practice it with fantastic skill, doesn't mean you're able to answer basic
questions about it or teach anyone to do the same. The problem is not just
"asking the right question" but also the skill of "giving the right answer".

To a large extent this territory is covered well by teachers of all kinds.
Pedagogy itself takes practice. I wonder if anyone has written a blog post
with a 21 point checklist on how to ANSWER questions?

------
squidfood
A variant of rubber-duck debugging: Ask the question and hit Send. Invariably,
no matter how long I've thought about it, the obvious answer will occur to me
minutes (or seconds) after I've embarrassed myself my asking. (is there a term
for this?)

~~~
banana_giraffe
L'esprit de l'escalier debugging?

------
ngokevin
In one rare case of my project, there is a person that bombards every single
one of the project's social channels daily (Facebook, multiple Slack channels,
DMs) with the same question: "how do i do this? <link to some website>".
Asking questions is fine, but there's a point where they can be taking
hundreds of people's time (even for a second).

I try to shepherd to StackOverflow asking for at least a code sample and some
attempt at implementation where I am happy to answer. I've also done
interventions with the offending person. But at least, no avail, it continues.
They go to the local communities of other countries on Facebook and ask the
same question, often in all caps.

I am trying to write a full guide and example on "how to do X", but these
cases are very testing.

~~~
badsock
Are you sure that's not spam?

------
emmelaich
Part of the problem is that the best advice sounds aggressive or rude. What
I'm thinking of is from bugzilla:

    
    
        1. what did you do?
        2. what did you get?
        3. what did you expect?
    

It's very hard to couch this politely enough for colleagues to take it on
without a sense of resentment.

~~~
adekok
Those points _are_ polite.

If people get resentful when you ask for data, the solution is to have a
discussion about their poor attitude.

Most large companies I've been at are _terrible_ at this. They want
"professionalism", which tends to mean "superficially polite, even if the
questions are utterly retarded". They don't like "unprofessional" behavior,
which tends to mean "you got frustrated that someone else wasn't doing his
job".

The effect is that management pushed people to be incompetent, in the guise of
"getting along". The competent technical people tend to leave such
organizations.

~~~
emmelaich
> Those points are polite.

I know what you mean and I agree but unfortunately most people don't.

~~~
dasil003
Mm, I've never had a problem asking those 3 questions of any non-technical
person that comes to me for help. Whether it's perceived as polite or not is
entirely contained in the tone. You can say that exact terse statements very
politely or very rudely or anywhere in between.

I'm somewhat privileged to have had a 20 year career in mostly competent
workplaces, and I understand that in some places where engineers are held in
low regard that you might get a lot of "stop asking questions and fix the damn
problem already", but it never hurts to cultivate a pleasant disposition in
the workplace.

------
CM30
Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here. Some service where you can
actually pay money up front to guarantee an answer to your question,
regardless of how it's worded and expect it done within a short time frame.
Kind of like the Stack Exchange sites, except for people with more money than
patience.

Practically speaking though, my advice for people stuck on something like this
is (in addition to doing some actual research and wording your question
correctly) to not ask on question and answer sites at all. Stack Overflow is
nice and all (especially when looking up answers to already answered
questions), but I tend to get a lot more useful responses from forums and
subreddits. Perhaps because people there tend not to get so high strung over
idiocy.

~~~
planteen
You are going to get in situations where the "answer" brings up a topic like
the "halting problem". The asker might not be satisfied with that.

Or what if the asker has a misunderstanding of computer architecture? "Help,
my multithreaded program is crashing!"

~~~
CM30
That's a good point, and there will definitely be issues with question askers
not knowing how a system works or how the person answering is explaining the
solution to their problem.

However, it's also the kind of thing tech support has to deal with every day
to begin with. I mean, your web host likely gets tons of ridiculous questions
through their support ticket system. They just have to go back and forth a ton
of times until either both sides can reach an understanding or the person
asking just gives up.

Honestly, I don't have an answer here. Not sure there even is a good one,
given how it's the same problem every company struggles with when customer
support is involved.

------
rabboRubble
From personal experience, telling tech support too little about an error will
result in no solution. Being able to tell them too much, oddly, often results
in the same.

~~~
mercer
I think that's kind of the core of the issue. When faced with a problem, in
general, it can produce a kind of knee-jerk/panicked reaction.

To come up with a good question requires some level-headed thinking. Give too
little information and it's hard to get help. Give too much, and you're either
leading support down the wrong path or overwhelming them with useless data
(which, somehow, annoys me when people do it to me, which doesn't help).

But because our mind is in agitation/panic mode, we just randomly try stuff,
including thoughtless cries for help.

What I find interesting is that I'm just as susceptible to this when it comes
to issues with my own work. I've been doing this for quite a while now, and
yet I still regularly either thoughtlessly play whack-a-mole with a bug, or
alternatively go down some obscure rabbit-hole of searching for answers. Very
often in both cases the problem would've been easily solved with a clear head
and a methodic approach (no matter which approach, really).

Hell, that's the whole reason 'rubber duck debugging' is a thing and so
effective!

I'd say all this applies equally to things like conflicts or relationship
issues. So many problems I've had over the years with people just melted away
once both parties bothered to stop and think about how they communicate, or
even just deciding what the actual problem is. But of course that's the last
thing you do in a state of agitation.

------
jaclaz
But I guess that somewhere a line must be drawn, there is a difference between
a "common user" and a "software engineer", and as well some differences
between people that try to help strangers on "third party" issues for free and
a developer supporting his/her (paying) customers or debugging his/her company
internal issues.

A good page about the proper way to ask questions/reporting problems on the
internet is (was) here (among many other good FGA's), to avoid the common "I'm
ill, doctor. Help!" effect:

[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160520121511/http://homep...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20160520121511/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/)

[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160604095422/http://homep...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20160604095422/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/problem-
report-standard-litany.html)

------
Inetgate
That page return 500 error. Here is archive
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170215034605/http://rion.io/20...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170215034605/http://rion.io/2017/02/09/why-
wont-you-answer-my-question/)

------
iceberg
I used to do a lot of searching the Internet for a solution to a problem I ran
into while coding and then I ended up having a bunch of web-links to fixes I
didn't write. I got annoyed with myself about this.

Instead of searching the Internet I started really get to know the API and
libraries of the languages I used and I got good books on the topics of
software I develop. I slowly moved away from searching the Internet for a
solution to using the books and delved into the language API. I now feel I've
a deeper knowledge of the languages I work with and the techniques used to
solve problems in my field.

Now when time is against me and I need a quick answer to a problem I search
the Internet for an existing answer.

------
jtraffic
I haven't taken much CS, but I took a class on computationally intensive
statistics. It changed my life, because every week I was assigned to do things
that we hardly covered in class. I felt so lost for while, until I got the
hang of the stuff described in this post. It's really empowering. The only
constraint becomes time, not intelligence.

I always find it sad when people are impressed that I "can program." Not only
because people tend to think of it as binary when it's not, but because they
think programming, like math, is the exclusive domain of people with certain
inherent qualities.

------
makecheck
To add to the Google point, it makes a big difference to add some double-
quotes around the multi-word phrases that belong together (especially when
most of your issue is made up of common English words).

Part of the entitlement problem does not seem to be limited to development.
There’s a lot of overlap with the way people are being treated in retail, for
example. What the _hell_ is it about “I am trying to help you” that just makes
some people turn into tyrants and treat helpers like part of the problem?

------
Beltiras
I sometimes use a variant of rubber duck debugging. Two projects I have been
responsible for started by me taking over from a contractor who was on-call to
resolve issues. I would start an email to him describing the problems and
asking good questions. More often as my understanding of the systems
progressed the emails would not get sent since the act of explaining it to
someone I _knew_ could fix the problem led me to understand the error.

------
Safety1stClyde
Yet more whining about questions.

If the questions come by email, delete the email. Not a difficult operation.

If you encounter stupid questions due to your participation in a website, stop
visiting that website, or stop answering questions on the website. Not a
difficult operation.

The people who write long screeds about answering/asking questions are all
masochists.

------
TwoNineFive
Help-me zombies can't be reasoned with, or helped.

They don't have brains, and want to eat yours.

"HELP ME" "HELLLLLLLPPPPPP MEEEEEEE"

they screech in the title of their emails and forum posts

Don't be fooled. There is no helping them.

Pardon my humor. I do my share of helping, and seeking of help.

~~~
klibertp
I don't know if that's true, but it certainly feels that way - some people
seem to be unable to ever learn how to ask for help. I don't know the reasons,
be it laziness, low IQ, other character traits, learned and ingrained
attitudes, whatever - but they are extremely resistant to any kind of
education on how to solve problems (and asking for help is one of the skills
included in problem-solving). For such people the term "help-me zombie" is
quite fitting, I feel.

