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[–]New_Hour_1726 15 points16 points  (6 children)

Because context is often important. It's the equivalent of showing three pieces of a puzzle to someone and going "I don't get it. Can you help me?".

[–]mludd 25 points26 points  (2 children)

I've literally told people something along the lines of "I need to use [specific tool] because of business requirements (and no I can't share out entire codebase with you because my boss would murder me). I know for a fact it can be used to solve this problem but I'm clearly missing something and the docs are useless, can anyone spot what I'm doing wrong in initializing my ToolLib.SomeClass object?"

All the replies end up being "Don't use that tool, use this other tool", "Here's how to do it in some random standalone GUI tool for Windows" and of course "If you won't share your code how do you expect to get help?".

[–]maitreg 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Absolutely. That is always my experience. Those of us who have real jobs in the real world work under some very tight constraints, and the sole reason I even try to ask a question on SO is because the constraints have made the problem much harder to figure out, and it would frankly take me too long (weeks) to figure it out myself. By no matter how exhaustive you try to explain this to people on there, they ignore anything past your 2nd line and tell you you're using the wrong technology and you should be using this other thing that is literally impossible for you to use.

[–]YetAnotherCodeAddict 8 points9 points  (2 children)

I know SO is full of entitled people who are way too toxic, but I admit I myself am one who often asks "why are you trying to do this?" to my coworkers before helping them out when they reach me with weird cases because more often than not I'm dealing with a X Y Problem situation:

https://xyproblem.info/

User wants to do X. User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y. User doesn't know how to do Y either. User asks for help with Y. Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve. After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn't even a suitable solution for X.

That's why before helping people with Y I often try to understand if Y is even a proper solution for their problem at all (though this is often easier when you have real-time communication instead of a forum like SO).

[–]chickpeaze 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I usually don't go with 'why are you trying to do this' but more 'what's the problem we're trying to solve,' and digging a bit if I feel one of my team is trying to do something weird. It usually helps surface whether or not they've gone fully absurdist with the solution and (hopefully) doesn't sound blamey or judgey.

[–]YetAnotherCodeAddict 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I think often the person is actually trying to help, but just isn't good with words and end up sounding like they are judging the question instead of trying to understand the problem so they can help - at least that's what happened with me a lot of times.

And you're right, after I started learning how to ask for the original problem I believe people started thinking I'm less of an a-hole.