Learning is a process of having questions and finding answers. Sometimes those questions are ones you didn’t know you had yet, other times you’re searching for the answers for a long time. There are lots of ways to get answers, but one of the most obvious is to ask someone else. How you ask, however, is of key importance. If you aren’t paying someone to answer your questions for you, then you’re essentially asking a favor of that person, so making an effort to show you both did independent work trying to solve the question yourself and did independent research to find a solution is important to getting a good response. Failing to do so will ultimately waste both people’s time.
Smart
So what makes a question smart or not? I’d say the effort you put into the question should be on par with the effort you expect to get from an answer. A good question shows you did your own work to try to research and solve the problem you have, and also shows you are willing to put the effort in to learn. Here’s an example of a good question:
How to optimize c binary file reading
This question displays a good amount of effort was put into solving the problem on the askers own, and shows what efforts and research were done before asking. The answers show a likewise honest effort to help, and it ended up with a good solution for the asker’s problem. Not only that, it also provided useful information for other people who may have had similar questions (like myself) and helped them as well.
and not so smart
Bad questions don’t generally get good responses, and what responses they do get are often only as good as the question itself. Problems like having an overly vague question may indicate the asker may not actually know what they’re asking themselves. Not showing effort on the askers part may also tell people who could answer the question that the asker isn’t particularly interested in learning, but just want to toss their work onto someone else. A poorly written question gets in the way of people actually understanding it simply due to the difficulties in reading it. As an example:
Get the percentage of a number with javascript
This question indicates the asker both isn’t particularly interested in learning and hasn’t done any research. The solution could have been easily found independently via web search. There were some people nice enough to respond with answers regardless, but as some of the flippant comments indicate, the general response to the question wasn’t very good.
Independence
Software engineering and learning programming are particular as areas where independent research and learning is a major aspect. Learning how to ask good questions not only helps yourself, by increasing your chance of getting a high-quality answer; every good question has the potential to help even more people who may end up with a similar problem.