What are askers looking for in a Stack Overflow answer?

Question

What are the people on this website looking for?

• Straight, working code that they can just copy/paste into their programs?
• How they should think, the function and the patterns they should use, links to documentation, blogs discussing the problem, related topics, etc.

Sometimes I've seen people give a good hint to help askers resolve their problem (by which I mean, if they would have used this link/pattern/function they would have solved their problem). But instead of accepting such an answer, they would rather accept an answer from someone else who gave them the code to use directly.

So, which strategy should answers follow?

Answer 1

The short answer would be: IT DEPENDS but:

I would say you can (ROUGHLY) get your answer on the relationship between code and text in the question.

Whole lot of code and no explanation of the problem == solve my problems don't bore me with the details.

Code in between lots of explanation == help me understand the problem and solve it.

Of course you have to see each question individually, I guess with a little reading in between lines, you can see what the OP needs/wants.

EDIT:

I would also say that among newbies, code is much appreciated since if you only help them in the theoretical approach they might have a rough time coding the idea.

(This might be also a good approach to see what people want/like, the more "theoretical" / "conceptual" the question is, the less code it will need - in most of the cases of course)

Answer 2

I'd say there are askers and askers. Some of them have actual problems to solve and they seek solutions, be it code or explanation. They tend to want to understand both the problem and the solution(s).

Others, well, I suspect, are not quite sure what they're looking for. Mostly beginning/casual developers, confused by terminology and by the programming language, they often cannot communicate their questions properly. Some of them cannot type, some can barely speak English. You can feel their pain, but actually helping them is hard. I guess too many people are tricked into believing that software development is about 35.28 times easier than it is. Such victims definitely expect copy-paste-ready code and don't appreciate being told to "go start learning". On the other hand, a novice who is aware he's a novice is sometimes a pleasure to meet, especially when you see his progress.

Of course, the above is overgeneralization and oversimplification.

Answer 3

I'm inclined to including both (if possible). I.e. give some code snippet, but also explain how things should work and where to look for more details. Hence I leave it to the asker to decide whether just a copy-paste would do, or he needs to read more.