I am not talking about simplified answers, rather simplified questions.
I’d estimate fully 80% of questions that cause trouble for those who want to help suffer from this. The person seeking help doesn’t want to “burden” the helpers with the complicated truth so, they simplify.
The problem is, they don’t know the answer so they don’t know how to pick among the facts and circumstances to make a simple version. Interrelated to this is the error of asking about an ignorantly selected “solution” instead of presenting the problem.
If you need expert help, why would you imagine that you know what’s needed before you get it?
So many times people show up asking things that turn out to be completely useless when answered and they finally say something like “well actually, I am trying to do X...” and finally get help.
My career as a consultant often started with clients asking if I could make some piece of hardware or software “work” and ended up with telling them to chuck it out because when I did make it work they’d still have the problem they thought it would solve. Consultants often get a bad name because they simply do what the client asks, successfully, and leave them with a big bill and the original problem.
In a programming community in which I was very active, I developed a rule for questions: “tells us what you have, what you want to happen, and give examples of real data—not some random part of your problem, and not some fake data you you think is the same thing as the real data”.
The hard part of all this is that regular question askers can be taught it, and do learn as it gets them effective help. Hit and run askers waste a lot of time going through the bad solution and fake data phase, if they ever get out of it.
I’d estimate fully 80% of questions that cause trouble for those who want to help suffer from this. The person seeking help doesn’t want to “burden” the helpers with the complicated truth so, they simplify.
The problem is, they don’t know the answer so they don’t know how to pick among the facts and circumstances to make a simple version. Interrelated to this is the error of asking about an ignorantly selected “solution” instead of presenting the problem.
If you need expert help, why would you imagine that you know what’s needed before you get it?
So many times people show up asking things that turn out to be completely useless when answered and they finally say something like “well actually, I am trying to do X...” and finally get help.
My career as a consultant often started with clients asking if I could make some piece of hardware or software “work” and ended up with telling them to chuck it out because when I did make it work they’d still have the problem they thought it would solve. Consultants often get a bad name because they simply do what the client asks, successfully, and leave them with a big bill and the original problem.
In a programming community in which I was very active, I developed a rule for questions: “tells us what you have, what you want to happen, and give examples of real data—not some random part of your problem, and not some fake data you you think is the same thing as the real data”.
The hard part of all this is that regular question askers can be taught it, and do learn as it gets them effective help. Hit and run askers waste a lot of time going through the bad solution and fake data phase, if they ever get out of it.
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