I asked a question on a forum about why a command wasn’t working. They said I didn’t have an interpreter installed on my computer and were making fun of me. I showed them that I had one installed and that wasn’t the problem, but they continued to talk sarcastically to me without explaining anything. Only one of them suggested the cause of the problem, and he was right, so I thanked him. Then another guy said that if I couldn’t figure it out myself, I should do something else and that he was tired of people like me. After that, I deleted my question, and now I’m not sure. And I don’t think I want to ask for help ever again
Because there is a huge demographic of nerds that are actually chuds and learned absolutely nothing from being bullied and/or being a beginner when they were younger.
I bet you can picture the demographic that they overlap with, but I’ma try not to explicitly make this political.
A lot of them learned the wrong lessons from bullying, or learned it from those who were in the intersection of the nerd-jock dichotomy. Those were usually the worst.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of pretentious and impatient assholes in this field.
That being said, IRL, I’ve had coworkers that are assholes, and I’ve had coworkers that have been the most amazing people. Just depends on who’s on your team and who you have to interact with.
I’ll take it a step further and say that most of the people I’ve worked with have been amazing. Really just some very enjoyable people to be around.
Something about the field though seems to really attract the super assholes and they’re so assholish that they color the perception of the whole field.
It’s really unfortunate how a very loud, very obnoxious minority can have such an outsized impact.
I agree. I had one super asshole on my team a while back and it was hell. I dreaded every meeting. Once he left I realized how much I enjoy everyone else on my team. Lot of really great folks.
alot of questions are of the “i have gone out of my way to avoid reading/searching any documentation” variety, i imagine those get annoying pretty quick
Why do you think they went into a profession where they communicate primarily with a machine?
…what is is to be a woman in STEM. and why a lot of women leave and why it’s a sausage party. And also why women online often disguise themselves even in games.
That being said I suggest this when some rando online is trying to pressure you: when a person is so fragile to be easily annoyed by your existence: exist harder. They are the fool for giving you such power. Lean into it. Ask more questions. Watch them stir in their seat overreacting.
Cuz one thing I’ve learned is when you are that brave: there are twice as many newbies hiding around you thinking you’re awesome for asking all the hard questions.
Don’t delete because of some elitist assholes. Leave it up for the other newbies. Get more newbies up in their business.
I run into people like that at work and what I’ve discovered is they have no idea they’re being rude. Some people in technology are genuinely that out of touch.
Yeah, it’s common, especially in programming. It’s true that searching on Google usually solves the problem, but the biggest issue is that it’s hard to know the exact word you need to use. They know the word so it’s trivial for them, but that’s not the case with others, and they’re proud that they’re out of touch with people.
It’s true that searching on Google usually solves the problem, but the biggest issue is that it’s hard to know the exact word you need to use.
I tell people 90% of IT (and development I assume) is knowing what questions to ask, where to ask those questions, and how to interpret the answers. It’s like the search for the ultimate question in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
As for Google, I think it’s getting less useful, so the days of saying “just google it” are gone.
“Have you asked the clanker yet?”
Most of my search process prior to LLM was querying google with keywords and specific phrases, clicking through several of the first page links that are from reputable sources, reading all of that, synthesizing an answer. Now that google has completed its enshittification of search, it’s index is gamed both from the SEO grifters and from inside with them making search worse because it ultimately leads to more ad impressions. The quality of those first page links is directly related to how much the stink of money the topic has.
I now pay for search with kagi (not an ad, swear) so that incentives are properly aligned. I get very useful first page links again because I can lens the search to exclude a lot of the SEO shit sites or only return academic sources. And I also use their robot assistant now for many searches because it can synthesize good summaries and good gists of topics from good source links. Prompted to always cite shit so I can always verify the clanker’s bullshit, but trust has been getting higher lately as the models get better.
At some point we will end up with a lmgtfy.com but lmpalfy.com (let me prompt an LLM for you)
Some people are just dick. There might be a bigger crossover between programmers and socially inadequate people, but thankfully it’s not a complete overlap (I hope).
Hopefully you’ll find saner people somewhere else. It’s fine being snarky with people you know and know can handle it, but doing so with stranger online really looks bad moist of the time.
Without seeing the entirety of the interaction, it’s hard to be sure.
Some people are assholes, and because nobody wants to interact with assholes, they usually end up congregating on whatever forum doesn’t ban them. Moderation is hard and ban evasion is often easy, so there end up being a lot of places like that.
The other side is that people in general ask a lot of bad questions, and a forum flooded with bad questions becomes useless because people who could answer good questions either get tired of it and leave, or spend so much time on the bad questions they don’t have time for the good ones. People get frustrated when they think that’s happening to a forum they enjoy, and programmers are famously better at communicating with machines than with people.
Here’s are some tips to ask good questions about programming:
- First, try to find the answer without asking other people. This is especially important when it comes to programming because the whole job is problem-solving. That means figuring out how a search result, LLM output, or published documentation relates to whatever it is you’re trying to do.
- Once you’re sure you need help from other people, clearly articulate what it is you want to happen, what you tried in order to achieve it, and what actually happened. Use more detail than you think you need here, especially regarding your expectations. Sometimes the mere act of composing a question this way leads you to the answer, which is effective enough there’s a popular technique of explaining problems to inanimate objects.
- Include the troubleshooting steps you tried from the first step above in your question. By typing it out, you may discover an error or omission in your process, but you also communicate to other people that you’re not just being lazy, wasting their time, and reducing the signal to noise ratio of their forum.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html <-- this too
I had that in mind, but it’s been a while since I read it and skimming it today, it seems a little dated. The tone may also be a bit harsh to offer to OP in this thread.
A little bit dated, but it seems like it has been receiving updates. There is a whole section at the bottom now about how to answer questions (ie. don’t be an asshole). I really want to emphasize that idea. Lots of FOSS communities now have codes of conduct which I find useful in mitigating this behavior, too.
As for the tone, it definitely has an ivory tower, individualism, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, slanted view but I don’t think it unduly burdens a newbie to learn how to teach themselves by ensuring they’ve exhausted all the typical avenues of stored knowledge before bothering someone with a well-crafted question. It is a self-sufficiency that has very positive returns in the future.
Without more context, it is difficult to say how justified OP is in their read of the situation. Maybe the forum posters weren’t really out of line because the general topic was #random and OP asked in the wrong place?
A large majority of programmers seem to think sharing knowledge means they will lose value so they are super stingy with it. “Back in my days” you’d find people literally using their shoulders to block anyone’s view of their code
99% of those are terrible programmers that do not really understand what they are doing.
RTFM
~(but seriously, best attempt is to post wrong code and claim it’s the best solution for a problem - you will be instantly corrected)~
That has never worked for me. People actually upvoted my wrong code and said it was correct when I tried this.
Which forum lol?
If you asked the question properly and they still gave you more grief than help, then it’s their fault for sure.
Without knowing the context - that’s key both questions, the one you asked then and the one you’re asking now - we can’t be sure what happened. And I’m not going to jump to conclusions about how much context you started with in your actual question because that is no help to you.
I say point us to the question – and accept we’re going to answer honestly.
This is why I do actually use AI - teach and troubleshoot. Infinite patience is something technicians do not possess. Rather the opposite. Claude will happily spend hours explaining things or asking me background questions, or letting me ask questions I would be afraid to ask otherwise. I hated having to spend an hour or two simply researching for the QUESTION I wanted to ask so that people wouldn’t accuse me of being an idiot, because I used the wrong terminology or something. I still encounter this from other sysadmins at work, so I often ask Claude if my question makes sense or if there’s chance for confusion. As a result I actually learn a lot more, a LOT faster, and get the rough touch so much less.
people suck online because there’s zero physical consequences to being rude. this isn’t a problem on forums like the one you visited, but all of them tbh
Nothing makes some sad sacks feel better about themselves than making fun of someone for not knowing what they have learned. Just know they have been pants on their heads stupid about something and had to ask for help. Count on it.
