<story><title>How to ask good questions</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Waterluvian</author><text>Having suffered severely from impostor syndrome for a few years, I caught myself asking a lot of really useless advanced questions that made me feel&amp;#x2F;look smart, and ignore the simpler but useful questions.&lt;p&gt;I was afraid that I would spill the beans on being a fraud who had no idea what he was doing, so I&amp;#x27;d pretend that of course we&amp;#x27;ll use library X to write algorithm Y, but then bring up unnecessary complexity about implementation details.&lt;p&gt;One significant transition I made as I started to feel valuable and deserving of my position was to stop asking stupid questions and start asking simple questions.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to ask good questions</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danso</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Do some research&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;To me, doing research is the lowest hanging fruit with the highest return on investment. From a journalism context, I push students to hit LexisNexis and Google hard before they do interviews. Whenever a student complains that they don&amp;#x27;t have any interesting questions to ask, or the subject had nothing interesting to say, almost always the problem could have been mitigated with pre-interview research.&lt;p&gt;The benefits of doing research for interviewing:&lt;p&gt;- You can learn the boilerplate of the subject, which serves the dual purpose of making you more nimble in interpreting the context of responses and saves you from wasting valuable question time of basic info (&amp;quot;So when did you start directing, Mr. Tarantino?)&lt;p&gt;- You can learn the current or ongoing controversies of a subject, from which almost all interesting questions arise.&lt;p&gt;- You find other interesting people to interview.&lt;p&gt;When your questions are derived from research, you save time by cutting through the boilerplate and any bullshit that might be offered as a response. Furthermore, there&amp;#x27;s an unquantifiable benefit in increasing &lt;i&gt;respect&lt;/i&gt; -- that is, your subject will give you more serious, thoughtful answers because they see that you&amp;#x27;ve put serious, thoughtful effort into understanding them.&lt;p&gt;You can gain this rapport if you&amp;#x27;re in a position of authority, or have the chance of multiple interviews. But in cases where you&amp;#x27;re just another possibly-threatening interrogator, doing your research is an easy and accessible way of increasing your authority, and thus, the quality of answers you receive. It can more than make up for in-person skills, depending on the situation and subject.&lt;p&gt;Edit: the OP suggests not being so strict on Gogling-before-asking, because she likes to ask basic questions during casual conversation, like over lunch&amp;#x2F;coffee. I think you can have your cake and eat it too. Sometimes I&amp;#x27;ll ask questions that I already know the answer to, as an icebreaker. But again, this requires research for the domain knowledge. Ideally, you want your icebreaker questions to be one that you anticipate the person is enthusiastic to answer. While they&amp;#x27;re saying what you think they&amp;#x27;ll say, you can spend that time gauging the person&amp;#x27;s mood and think of segues into other lines of questioning. Of course, once in awhile, they&amp;#x27;ll respond to your softball basic question with something that you didn&amp;#x27;t expect...and that in itself leads to potential insights.</text></comment>