Comment by gaze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaze | Hacker News Reader

From being on both ends of this, just answer the question as asked. It’s especially irritating when people essentially overreach and just decide you’re asking the wrong question. You’re saying “no I’m insisting on being more helpful than you’re asking me to be.” Just answer the damn question and let the person run into the next stumbling block. Why be so upset that the problem you’re now imagining hasn’t yet been solved? Your job is done.

The most I think that’s appropriate to do is to answer the question and THEN ask what they’re trying to do. If they bite, they bite.

Truly where does this end. You could say — they’re asking the wrong question for a reason. Sounds like you’re not thinking about the situation right because you’re not staying sharp. Have you tried doing sudoku puzzles? Maybe your mind is clouded due to anger. How’s your relationship with your parents? Have you checked for a gas leak in the room you’re working in?

You're being silly. Why are "answer the question as stated" or "deconstruct the person's entire life to find their ultimate problem" the only logically consistent possible courses of action?

If someone asks a question that suggests something might have been misunderstood, there's nothing wrong with probing a little to find the reason for the question. Maybe the person really does know something you didn't, but it's much more likely that by asking clarifying questions you'll save theirs and your own time.

I was providing a silly example but there is a continuum as you’ve identified. My point is that it’s not your place to decide how far along this continuum to go. It’s the job of the person asking the question.

The person asking the question is frequently not the person with the knowledge to determine this.

The X-Y response shows up frequently on support forums where people are asking questions that show they haven't yet grasped the system they are working on.

X-Y "answerers" also show up on simple, straightforward questions there are no reasons to demand a backstory for.

X-Y answers also clog up Google search results when sometimes my problem literally actually is X and not Y.

I think it is your place, because it's your time being taken by people asking questions. It's an often a thankless job people do because they want to help. If you think you might be doing more harm than good by "just answering the question" you're not helping anymore, which then somewhat defeats the purpose many people are doing it. But really, the simpler reason is that, if your helping out others, your giving them your time, so they should respect it, so answering some questions while getting help is part of that respect.

Giving people something they didn’t ask for is an iffy thing to expect respect for. I like the suggestion higher up - answer the literal and then propose why it might not be what one wants to do. The dynamics of how the conversation is happening change things too. In person it’s easy to have long back and forth with detailed explanations and inquiries without taking up much of either person’s time. Online public responses it can easily waste thousands of people’s time if you insist on giving only a partial answer and that’s not really all that benevolent. Between the two (or in between) you get different answers to when an answer type works efficiently.

A big reason is that you work at the same company working to the same goals. Your "job" is probably more than just answering contextless questions.

A questioner asking "how do I get all of the emails from the production database?" certainly does warrant some additional probing and "what's a regex for valid emails?" might need a "don't do that, we need the validity of emails to be consistent across services even at the expense of correctness so..."

Admittedly when I was writing this I was thinking about the rather narrow case of answering questions on IRC or forums or what have you. Volunteer stuff. It does get substantially more complicated when your job depends on them getting to the answer.

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