Any colleague who receives this article from me will be tagged with poor at communication, and I will avoid communicating with them
unless they deeply study the communication techniques in this article and put them into practice
Example
A very bad way to communicate (abridged)
A relatively good way to communicate
The principle is: don't assume I know all the circumstances. I'm not the person who arranges your work. You should proactively describe, in as much detail as possible, what your on-site situation is, what your operation process was, and whether you have already done any troubleshooting on your own. Describe, as free of judgment as possible, what happened in the physical world and what phenomena you observed.
In the first case, the questioner spent two or three hours troubleshooting and thinking on their own, and made many attempts — you can't say they weren't working hard. But during the communication, they turned all that two or three hours of effort into nothing, because I didn't know exactly what they had done. I would have them repeat the operation in the direction of my guess and tell me the symptom. And in the back-and-forth of questioning, another half hour to two hours of both sides' time was wasted.
If the questioner carefully considers what they actually did and spends 20 minutes condensing and editing it before sending it to me, then with the second way of asking, I will quickly pinpoint what the problem really is. It costs the questioner 20 minutes, while I need almost no time at all.
Some essential techniques excerpted from other articles
Sourced from:
tvvocold/How-To-Ask-Questions-The-Smart-Way: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way — Chinese Edition
A group member's masterpiece — “How to Ask Questions Without Looking Like an Idiot”
My own little clever ideas
Ask clearly, but that doesn't mean details are useless
For truly skilled questioners, pointing out the core problem and attaching appropriate supplementary description is a stress-free thing. They're certainly not the ones who would ever need this article.
I hope that readers of this article can extract what they think is the clearest question and the most appropriate supplementary description, and put them at the very front of their message.
But the clarity you think you have certainly cannot be actually clear. So please —
At the same time, write out your complete operation process — exactly what you did — describe it in as much detail as possible, as supplementary information to the supplement, attached after the question. This will make it vastly more convenient for the answerer to understand the situation. Trust the answerer's ability: what took you two or three hours to write, they can still finish reading in ten minutes.
Don't send your question piecemeal
Please actually compose the “question” in a text editor, read it through once yourself, and then send it all at once.
This saves the answerer a lot of time, and lets the answerer concentrate like on a puzzle, rather than like a detective who keeps finding new clues, having to re-sort everything from the beginning and getting their work interrupted — which usually infuriates technical people.
Don't replace what you should actually do with groveling
Some people know they shouldn't ask rudely or arrogantly and demand a reply, but they choose the other extreme — groveling: I know I'm just a pitiful novice, a loser, but.... This is both confusing and useless, and is especially off-putting when accompanied by a vague description of the actual problem.
Don't use primitive primate tricks to waste both of our time. Instead, describe the background conditions and your problem situation as clearly as possible. That positions you much better than groveling.
Describe the goal, not the process
If you want to figure out how to do something (rather than report a bug), describe your goal at the very beginning, and only then state the specific steps that reproduce where you got stuck.
Drop meaningless question phrases
Avoid ending your question with meaningless words, such as Can anyone help me? or Is there an answer to this?.
This won't make you look polite.
First: if your description of the problem isn't very good, asking this way is gilding the lily.
Second: because this kind of question is superfluous, hackers will be annoyed by you — and they'll usually express their contempt with a logically correct but meaningless answer, such as Yes, someone can help you or No, there's no answer.
In general, avoid yes or no, right or wrong, is there or isn't types of questions, unless you want a yes-or-no type answer.
After the problem is resolved, add a brief follow-up note
To me, every problem should eventually reach a definitive conclusion; otherwise, it remains forever unresolved on my end.
For problems others bring to me, that conclusion depends on the other person providing it.
So whether it's truly resolved, shelved in the project, requires me to make changes, or can be glossed over by someone else's modification —
you should give me a reply within a week.
If you ask me a question but don't tell me the final result, then I can confirm that you're a dumbass, and will refuse all communication with dumbasses from now on.
Learn to highlight the key points
Screenshot half the screen, and you'll lose half your parents.
Screenshotting only a key piece of information, or the two lines above and below it, doesn't count as highlighting the key points. You need to include appropriate context; otherwise, there is simply no way to analyze it.
If you're not good at telling what counts as context, just screenshot the entire window or the entire screen, and use the built-in line-drawing function of the screenshot tool to circle the key information.
Know your goal
Your goal is to “solve the problem”.
Please don't throw out many questions at once. Find the most difficult and troublesome one, and compose a question about it.
I know you're in a hurry, but don't be. A pile of questions occupying my brain will only make me crash and give up — that cannot possibly help “solve the problem”.
Usually I'm a warm-hearted, polite person. I like it when anyone brings me problems to solve — I'm merely seeking this kind of mental calisthenics. But if — just if — I confirm that you're a dumbass who doesn't realize it, then you'll get my full-spectrum snark.
Techniques Colleagues Must Master When Asking Me Questions