There is No Such Thing as a Stupid Question (Google-Fu)

Have you heard this statement before?  I have; a lot.  I’d like to amend it though by adding, “unless you haven’t at least run it through a search engine yet.”  Constantly I find that people won’t even take the time to copy and paste an error message into a search engine before they post to a forum, send off an email or go bug another developer. Part of being more than a code monkey is doing a little thinking on your own. As a developer you need to hone your problem solving skills and become a better researcher. At least learn to ask the right questions. It’s one thing to go to another developer for help (which I encourage); it’s quite another to do so without even attempting to find the answer with a quick search. 

The above is a snippet from the most recent blog post in my friend Mike Wood's "Be a Better Developer" series.

The first thing I do EVERY TIME that I run into an error message that isn't familiar, self descriptive, or obvious to me is paste it into Google and see what comes up. More times than not, one of the top few posts will provide a solution.

The software development community in general and .NET developers specifically do a good job of blogging error messages that they receive and roadblocks that they run into and the solutions for them. Three of the posts on my site that get the most traffic (though each of the three are at least 2 years old) are those exact types of posts.

Nothing pisses me off more than to have someone ask a question about an error message without searching for that error message on one of the major search engines first. It should be the first basic step of troubleshooting!

I work with a great group of developers so I don't see this behavior anymore. But I used to spend a great deal of time helping people out on Microsoft's ASP.NET forums (http://forums.asp.net). I cannot tell you the number of "stupid questions" that get posted that would not be if people would just search first. Sometimes I would get so frustrated that I would just ignore the question, thinking to myself "I can't help you if you won't help yourself".

I rarely visit the ASP.NET forums anymore, unless a search leads me there :), but if I were to participate more I would make sure I answered those questions with "Search on Google for that term, the answer will be #2" or something like similarly appropriate.

I ask that the next time you run into a situation like this that you do the same. Tell them to search first then come back to you if they can't find an answer. Or have the first question that you ask be "Did you search for that error message on Google?". Or you could go the smartass route and use "Let me Google that for you".