PD

Prep - Asking Good Questions

Module
JS1
Skill
[Communication]
Minutes
60

Learning Objectives

  • List a set of good practices when asking and answering good technical questions

Preparation

No particular materials needed.

Introduction

Asking questions is part of our everyday life. In the workplace it is also really important that you know how to ask good questions and ask for help in a structured way. The better your questions are, the faster and better the answers you will get. And throughout your career, you will need to ask many questions to team members, stakeholders, even ChatGPT.

Exercises

Research asking good questions (15 minutes)

Goal: Learn how to ask good questions

Read here what Julia Evans wrote about how to ask good questions.

Which five of the following ideas do you think are the most important when asking good questions?

  • Stating what you know
  • Asking questions where the answer is a fact
  • Being willing to say what you don’t understand
  • Identifing terms you don’t understand
  • Doing some research before asking
  • Deciding who to ask
  • Asking questions to show what’s not obvious
  • Answering other people’s questions 
  • Preparing useful information to save the other person’s time
  • Identifying what you do already know, to put that out of scope of the “question”.
  • Other _________________________________________

Learn how to answer questions (15 minutes)

Goal: Learn how to answer questions helpfully

Read here what Julia Evans wrote about how to answer questions helpfully:

Which five of the following ideas do you think are the most important when answering good questions?

  • If they’re not asking clearly, helping them clarify
  • Figuring out what they know already
  • Pointing them to the documentation
  • Pointing them to a useful search
  • Writing new documentation
  • Explaining what you did
  • Solving the underlying problem
  • Asking “Did that answer your question?”
  • Not acting surprised
  • Letting them know what you level you expect them to be at.
  • Asking what steps they have taken to solve the question themselves.

Coming up with questions (15 minutes)

Goal: To think of technical questions that you will improve during the session

Think of three examples of technical problems that you have recently had. These could either be from JavaScript, HTML, CSS or any other technical area.  For example, they could be about error messages you didn’t expect or understand, or about code that didn’t work as you expected, or about webpages that didn’t get rendered as you anticipated. You’ll need these questions as you will work on them to structure them into good questions that are likely to get valuable responses on Saturday.

Unblocking someone or helping them to learn? (15 minutes)

Goal: Compare different ways of answering questions

A fellow trainee is asking a question on the channel that they are stuck, sends an example and asks for help.

You check it and you can find the problem immediately. What do you do?

  1. Give them the answer
  2. Prompt them with questions so they can find the answer themselves?

Think about the differences and the benefits between these questions.

And now, considering we want to help each other to learn, which strategy will you use more moving forward?