[HN Gopher] How to get useful answers to your questions
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How to get useful answers to your questions
Author : ingve
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-10-21 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jvns.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (jvns.ca)
| city41 wrote:
| If posting your question where a subject will be used (email,
| forums, reddit, etc), don't just make the subject "need help!".
| You've made it luck of the draw who clicks through. "Need help
| with React Router" will likely improve the quality of people who
| click through.
|
| Similarly, on chat programs, don't PM people. Please! If you have
| a general technical/business/etc question, a channel is a far
| better venue: everyone in the channel can be a candidate to
| answer. You increase the odds of someone being available to
| answer. Your answer goes into the search history and possibly
| helps other people who currently have the same question but are
| afraid to ask. It's also really unfair to put all of the onus
| onto one person via PM. If the person you would have PM'd is able
| to answer, they can also answer in the channel.
| switch007 wrote:
| Yes, DMs are for bitching and personal information. Everything
| else should be in channels.
|
| Edit: even some bitching should be rephrased constructively and
| put in a public channel!
| wiz21c wrote:
| FTA> don't accept responses that don't answer your question
|
| You can do that twice, after the person you're talking to tires.
|
| One of my helpful questions when people have hard time to measure
| something, I ask with power of 10. For example
|
| Me:"how long to have an approval for project X?"
|
| X:"Dunno, really, tough question..."
|
| Me:"A day ? Ten day, 100 days"
|
| X "no, not 100 days, yeah more like 50"...
|
| Somehow it helps people to think about it even when they don't
| want to answer.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| People can determine order of magnitude much easier than giving
| a more specific timeline.
|
| For support or feature requests, I use this progression:
| - Minutes - Hours - Days - Sprints (2
| weeks) - Quarters
|
| It's a lot less work for people to figure out what category
| their request belongs in.
|
| Note: In my company, next quarter means planned for next
| quarter, not ignore indefinitely.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| To me, this is similar to the same concept of the paradox of
| choose. Ask someone where they want to eat, and there are too
| many options too choose from, and they are also thinking about
| what you may want to eat as well. Provide them 3 options to
| choose from, and it gets the decision moving.
| nnf wrote:
| Another tip I use a lot: ask just one question per email.
|
| This seems inefficient, and it is, but there's a subset of people
| with whom I communicate in my industry, and they almost always
| will only answer one of my questions if I put multiple questions
| in an email. Even a simple one like:
|
| > Two quick questions for you:
|
| > 1. Do you want this or that?
|
| > 2. Which do you like better, A or B?
|
| Limiting to a single question and then following up with a second
| question takes longer, but I don't feel rude having to point out
| the second question that was missed/ignored from my initial
| email.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I use this tip as well. People don't read... until they do.
|
| This is a bit of a tangent...
|
| My incident reports are a good example of the reverse: giving
| good answers.
|
| * The first two sentences will explain what happened, the scope
| of impact, when it was fixed, and a plan of action.
|
| * The next paragraph or two has the important details.
|
| * Everything after is a detailed timeline (down to the minute
| if that information is available.)
|
| This allows anyone reading the email to read as much as they
| want without having to read everything.
|
| Effective communication is hard.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| the number of 2 question emails ignored infuriates me! I hate
| the inefficiency, but have learned to deal with it the same
| way. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.
| tempestn wrote:
| Great point. I often find myself frustrated when someone only
| answers one of my two (very clearly laid out) questions. Should
| definitely make more of a point of keeping it to one at a time.
| amelius wrote:
| Or send them a form with a submit button that works only if
| both answers are filled in.
| superdisk wrote:
| I've found that the problem with getting questions answered
| usually doesn't come down to poorly phrasing the question or
| whatever, it's when I write a detailed and high quality question
| and people just don't read it at all, instead choosing to just
| answer with some canned response to some other question because
| they didn't bother to read mine.
|
| It's like that beavis and butthead episode.
|
| Customer: I'm trying to ask a very simple question here, are your
| shakes made from shake mix or from ice cream and milk!?
|
| Butthead: We have vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=OQUaguZawJQ
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| What does a "detailed and high quality question" look like?
|
| If it's more than a few sentences I'm not surprised people are
| giving you canned responses, because it's too long.
| bberenberg wrote:
| This is critical reading for everyone we hire:
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
| Hokusai wrote:
| > My favourite tactic is to ask a yes/no question.
|
| Depending on culture and hierarchy that can be a bad idea.
|
| > do you need to scale up by hand?
|
| In many places that is not a question, but just a rhetoric
| question that means 'doing it by hand is wrong'
|
| Open questions also allow to find concerns that I do not know
| about. Even asking 'how do you decide how to scale' may highlight
| hidden reason for that manual scaling.
|
| > state your current understanding
|
| I use this one a lot and it's very good to find when I may have
| misinterpret answers.
|
| > be willing to interrupt
|
| Quite cultural, depending who you are talking to, people will
| avoid talking to you all together.
|
| > take a minute to think
|
| If you find yourself entitled to interrupt people but ask others
| to wait for you that seems problematic.
|
| I guess that is a cultural thing. But I always get the best
| results by adapting to the other person preferred way of
| communication instead of imposing mine. My job requires to talk
| with people in different positions and in different countries,
| thou. Maybe it's different if you just talk with developers and
| with a very similar profile.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| >> be willing to interrupt > Quite cultural, depending who you
| are talking to, people will avoid talking to you all together.
|
| It can be done in various ways I guess. One thing I've been
| doing for some time now is to not directly interrupt but just
| start making "noise". Like for example going "Mhhh",
| accompanied by a "thinking gesture" and maybe murmuring
| "interesting" or some such.
|
| Some people are able to pick up on those things and will give
| you an opening to then actually ask your question or reply.
| Thus it feels way less like interrupting, especially as it can
| give the other person a chance to finish the immediate thought
| but then let you "interrupt".
|
| Some people don't pick up on this though and you might need to
| interrupt but what I try first is to write down what I wanted
| to say. Some people have a way of just talking and talking and
| jumping from one topic or area of a topic to another without so
| much as taking a breath. I make a point of then going through
| my list and proclaiming that I will go back to the first point
| they made, then the second one etc. Sometimes that helps.
|
| Sometimes it doesn't and I literally have to stop them then and
| there and actually saying it like that too "Sure that's a great
| topic but let's stay focused, we were gonna discuss X".
| tempestn wrote:
| I think it's also important to take into account the knowledge
| level of the person you're asking the question to. I often find,
| for example, that by the time I need to contact some sort of
| support person for an online or business transaction, I've
| exhausted most things they're generally used to, and tend to have
| a reasonably complex issue. You would think that "stating your
| understanding" would work well there, as it would get you past
| rehashing all the things you've already tried, but I find it
| usually backfires. More often it just throws the person off and
| you end up getting confusion and/or guesses presented as fact.
|
| So I guess I would generalize that step, so it's more like,
| "establish both parties' understanding," which you can do by
| getting into your own understanding more gradually, and gauging
| the responses.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| If it's phone support they might have a call-length metric.
| Stringing you along, but maybe not too much, might be useful to
| them!?
|
| I hate this too, fwiw.
|
| Though one time I was caught out on a forum: I said I'd 'turned
| it off and on again, lol!1one' and the respondent was like 'no
| you have to restart'. And that was the day I learnt Windows
| restart does something different to power-cycling.
|
| Issue still outstanding, but I did make the Jackie Chan 'wth'
| meme face, and whatever SE board voted to close it without a
| solution for whatever rubbish reason.
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(page generated 2021-10-21 23:01 UTC)