The xy problem and how to ask a question the right way

[blacksheep]

This is off the back of a few things at work and this thread - http://www.digital-forums.com/showth...-drive-problem . Now I'm not trying to be mean here, more trying to help people to help themselves/how people look at them/their questions.

The xy problem, asking for help with what you think the solution is rather than asking how to solve the problem - frequently ends up with more time being spent when there's a far simpler answer to x than to y.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem

Also, when asking questions showing that you've bothered to make some effort yourself (googled for it/rtfm/tried things out yourself)? If you haven't and you constantly run over for help on simple things your goodwill wears quickly.

This is something I'm trying to teach a support team at work - people will be far more willing to help if you're not seen as a "time sink"

How to ask a smart question - http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

This does annoy me and sucks a huge amount of time at work - am I alone in this?

[Over Carl]

I reckon this is one of those situations where you can't win. I remember when working in it support, often I would have to reply to a question and ask what it is the user is actually trying to achieve as I could tell from the question they didn't have a clue.

It wouldn't annoy me that badly though - at least to me it showed they had tried to put some thought into how to solve the problem - at the end of the day as much as making pc's work was what I was paid to do, the people coming to me with questions were mainly primarily employed for possessing different skill sets which I often lacked.

One thing I did for a while to try and improve my question asking/answering capabilities was to post on serverfault - the calibre of the posters there seemed very high - I lost count of times I thought I had given a great answer just to watch someone else show me how it's really done. Got bored of that site though after a while - a lot of people on there are very stuck up and I realised I was unemployed and using my time to help other people who are getting paid and should know how to do their jobs rather than finding myself a job

[blacksheep]

This is more questions from the support teams to developers - they literally just forward on mails with no effort put in at all or say a system hasn't come up they won't bother looking at logs/start scripts etc (and they're meant to be technically competent, able to script query databases etc).

I understand users might be technically less proficient but people that are meant to be should put in a little effort.

[JonEp]

I reckon this is one of those situations where you can't win. I remember when working in it support, often I would have to reply to a question and ask what it is the user is actually trying to achieve as I could tell from the question they didn't have a clue.

It wouldn't annoy me that badly though - at least to me it showed they had tried to put some thought into how to solve the problem - at the end of the day as much as making pc's work was what I was paid to do, the people coming to me with questions were mainly primarily employed for possessing different skill sets which I often lacked.

One thing I did for a while to try and improve my question asking/answering capabilities was to post on serverfault - the calibre of the posters there seemed very high - I lost count of times I thought I had given a great answer just to watch someone else show me how it's really done. Got bored of that site though after a while - a lot of people on there are very stuck up and I realised I was unemployed and using my time to help other people who are getting paid and should know how to do their jobs rather than finding myself a job

I for one have always been very impressed with the depth of knowledge and answers Over Carl has given to questions I and others have asked on DF. (so don't give up here m8 !)

As for the OP's question I have always understood the key quality of good support people is to be able to cut through the bullshit quickly, identify and get to the core of the problem, then fix it. I think the bullshit is part of the job.

Use to be the regional technical support engineer with a team of engineers, one or two were as bad as the customers when escalating the problem to me.