mikebernat.com Web-Development, Design, Usability

A natural continuation from my last post How do GOOD Developers Ask Questions?: How do good developers answer questions? When given a very specific question that you know has a very specific answer, your first reaction might be to blurt out the answer and be done with it. However, I like to go the extra step and ask what they've tried so far or what research they've done.  I like to show them how to arive at the answer on their own as well as provide the solution. The old 'Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.' Allowing one to do personal research leads to an infinite amount of additional knowledge compared to spoon-feeding code to others.

Ofcourse this doesn't apply to simple quick-reference type questions where you know full-well that the asker is capable of finding the solution on their own but are asking you to save time. AVOID PISSING OFF THE ASKER BY BEING CONDESCENDING OR ANNOYING.