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How to not get a question answered

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Raymond has had lots of great posts over the years on how to not get a question answered. Some of the ways he points out that help ensure that a question goes unanswered are:

I would add that phrasing the question in terms of the attempted solution rather than the underlying problem is a great way to have a question remain unanswered. But I already did that. Today's rant, rather, is:

A great way to not get your question answered is to treat the person that you're asking to share their time and knowledge like they're not a human being.

I understand that this is easy to do.

I understand that when someone is asking a technical question, it is almost always because they're deeply frustrated by their inability to make some important specific complicated thing work the way they'd expect.

I understand that software makers are a big source of frustration in a more general sense. We all use imperfect software every day; little frustrations mentally accumulate in a way that little victories do not.

I understand that programming languages and software in general is often counterintuitive, and that understanding the complex reasoning behind a counterintuitive result is often seemingly of little practical import compared to just getting the problem at hand solved.

I understand that it is very easy to use an email client as an impersonal and automatic information resource something like a search engine, where you just type in your query, you get your result back, and you move on with your day.

I understand that there is an inherent and pervasive bias in pure-text communication which makes statements intended to be good-humoured sound sophomoric, makes statements which were intended to be friendly sound smarmy, makes statements which were intended to be enthusiastic sound brash, makes statements intended to be helpful sound condescending, makes statements which were intended to be precise and accurate sound brusque and pedantic, makes statements which were intended to be positive sound neutral, and makes statements which were intended to be neutral seem downright hostile.

(Boy, do I ever understand that. For over four years I have deliberately tried to pitch the tone of this blog as good-humoured, friendly, enthusiastic, helpful, precise, accurate and positive; I suspect that most of the time I fail badly at most or all of those. Writing is hard.)

I understand all that, from both sides; I've certainly been on both the sending and receiving ends of all of the above, many times.

Which is why I try very hard to be helpful to the complete strangers who send me overtly rude and frequently profane emails capped off with a request for me to to take time out of my day to explain something to them.

I try to see an upset or confused user as an opportunity to make a good impression; sometimes people do a complete 180 when you help them out and are appreciative and grateful. Sometimes they even send an unsolicited note to your manager, which is always pleasant.

But more often, I never hear from them again after their question is answered.

None of this is in their own best interests. It makes the human information sources they rely upon less likely to help them now and in the future.

So, just a friendly reminder. (A friendly, good-humoured, helpful, enthusiastic, positive reminder!) The people you are sending email to about your technical problems are people. It would be smart to briefly introduce yourself, describe your problem without insulting the people who created it, indicate what you've done to attempt to solve it yourself, actually ask for help, and later say thank-you for their time whether they manage to actually help you or not.

It's smart because doing so is in your own best interests.

It would also be nice, but I actually am not particularly concerned about "nice" today. Nice is nice to have I suppose. But not being smart is just dumb.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    Couldn't agree with you more... just the other day I got an email from someone Him: I need you to look at these memory dumps Me: Sure thing, what's the problem? Him: Please read the email thread -- email thread was 58 pages and mostly in german Me: Sorry, I don't know german, and I want to help you but could you please give me a clue, is it a memory leak, hang, crash? what am I looking for?  what are the symptoms? -- 2 days go by Me: uhmm, did you want help or not? Him: yeah, the details are in the email thread, did you look at the dumps yet? Me: Still didn't take a class in german:) just tell me what the symptoms are and i'll look ... never heard from him since:) and believe me, next time he asks, i will not bother even asking for the details...

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    "We all use imperfect software every day; little frustrations mentally accumulate in a way that little victories do not." That quote just got Post-It Note'd to my monitor :) Well written post, and timely.  I've spent way too much time lately complaining publicly about software that I use daily that is written by real people, smart people, who may be overextended and not as concerned about quality as I might wish, but they are still people. Thanks for the reality check.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    Well said. Could you follow up with a short essay on how to not get your thoughtful blog comments answered, so that I can avoid those mistakes too? ;-)

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    February 20, 2008
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    February 20, 2008
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    February 20, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    Hi Eric, I'm guilty as charged. My apologies as you answered one of my questions a couple of weeks ago on tertiary operators and I have yet to say thank you and respond. So thank you. I was hoping to have a more appropriate response once my workload goes down a bit and I have a bit of time to do some research. However, ignoring the research aspect, my response is: Essentially, I agree, although tertiary operators when nested properly do look very similar to lisp's cond statement and therefore can be quite readable. What is more of an issue is memoization or a lack of it in c# as it means that variables are required, which leads to more statement based style of coding rather than expression based. Regards, Mark

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    Preaching to the choir somewhat on this blog I suspect.  Still, "amen".  My own failings, I suspect, are mostly in the condescending/pedantic neighbourhood.   What I've been doing lately (since my own communications are largely internal to my workplace) is to replace "you" with "we" in my emails whenever it's possible to do so.  So instead of "If you want to achieve result X, you have to stop doing Y, and you probably should consider Z." , I write "If we want to achieve result X, we have to stop doing Y, and we probably should consider Z." I like to pretend it helps a bit.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    "I understand that there is an inherent and pervasive bias in pure-text communication..." Printed in 30pts Helvetica and taped to my wall :). I enjoy your technical articles a lot but this one just made my day. Thanks for your time Eric! Goran

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    I was reading this on my train ride home and this post made me turn off the podcast i was listening to really take in everything you were saying (vs. the normal skimming i do of blogs). I definitely agree with what you are saying and am very guilty of many things in this area. After reading your post i almost want to email everyone i have bothered over the last few months and apologize LOL. Seriously, posts like this are very good reminders of how we should act towards others. Thank you for once again putting this in front for me and getting my attention. Best Regards and keep up the excellent blog (I agree with Jon, your content quality is excellent) Dmitry.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    I would like to take a moment here to genuinely and sincerely show my appreciation for your effort in writing this blog. Thanks! Kind ( and friendly, good-humoured,  enthusiastic, and positive) regards, Rik

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    Many years ago, I asked Eric to help me out in using MS Script control in a multi-threaded application. I was so surprised to see to the length he went to explain and debug things for me. Considering the fact that I was just a fresh (just-out-of-school) graduate and sitting in Karachi (Pakistan) working on a small project, getting help from a senior COM/scripting guy was fascinating. In fact, I was so impressed that I captured the whole conversation here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fast2000/message/1152. And the second time I asked him a question, he wrote a complete blog post about it: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2004/05/27/143203.aspx Thank you Eric for all the help. Writing a blog is one thing. Taking out time to answer emails and looking at someone's code to him out is something much demanding. Thanks, again.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2008
    I am amongst the silent readers who immensely enjoy your blog. Hey, I even like the purple color :) I would not want to cluther your inbox or blog with thank you messages for every post made, but I take this occasion to say that every single one of them is both interesting, insightful and technically accurate and complete. That is no small feast. So my hat's off to you for doing this on top of everything else.

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2008
    I'm over ten years late with this but... http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_thread/thread/c2b0f45927aea7d/58ee5678e6e76fa3?lnk=gst&q=nick+fitzsimons#58ee5678e6e76fa3 Thanks Eric - not just for that one, but for also for the other useful responses you contributed to comp.lang.javascript :-)

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2008
    Welcome to the forty-first Community Convergence. The big news this week is that we have moved Future

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2008
    Before I get into today's blogging, a quick note about my recent post on How To Not Get A Question Answered