The Art of Asking Questions

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Taro and delivered to your inbox for free!In this week’s Career Alert, we start with an announcement: Over the past year, our partner Rahul Pandey has shared his insights and advice for how to advance your career. Now, Rahul is passing the torch to a new expert, and this will be his final issue. But don’t worry—we’ll continue bringing the most important news and recommendations straight to your inbox.In the last issue, we highlighted a few of the most popular pieces of advice from 2025. To see all previous issues, check out our Career Alert archive. The #1 rule about asking questionsAs engineers, continuous learning is a fundamental part of the job. A huge part of learning comes from trying something, getting stuck, and then asking a question to your teammates. Here’s what is often overlooked in that process: The quality of your question determines the quality of the answer. So it’s worth thinking about how you can level up your question-asking skills.The guiding principle when it comes to asking a question is simple: Make it easy for others to help you. Let’s break down what that means.Include the necessary information. In the software engineering world, for instance, asking something like “Can you explain why the app is crashing?” puts an enormous burden on the question recipient to collect more info before they can help you. They’ll need to know:What action caused the app to crash? Does the issue reproduce? What do the logs reveal? It’s usually not hard to anticipate what follow-up questions you may receive after you ask a question. Include those details in your question!Show your work. One of the most common replies to a question is “What have you tried?” This is critical information to include in order to (1) improve the chances that the recipient can help you and (2) prove that you did the necessary homework. Common details to include are: prior team discussions, code snippets, and relevant data. But be careful not to overdo it. Including too much code in your question will overwhelm anyone who’s trying to help you. You should spend time identifying the snippet that captures the essence of your issue. Remember, the golden rule is to make it easy for others to help you, which requires your judgment on the right level of backstory to include.Explain your goal. The backstory is deceptively important in any question, especially for technical topics. For example, you may think it’s obvious why you’re trying to add a parameter to a function, but it’s probably not clear to your teammates. An error I’ve seen frequently is that the question is asked at the wrong “altitude”—the asker made some incorrect assumptions that led them to ask the wrong question.To get the best answers, include a brief explanation of your goals at the beginning of your que...