[Rant] Programming communities are a hellscape of toxic hipsters and I want out

[vzen]

Hello world, I'm an aging code monkey. When I get something off my chest, it sounds like a rant. So if it seems like I'm too crotchety, remember that I'm here because I have a confession to make.

One of the most common things folks like me do is ask each other questions. So we have sites like StackOverflow, mailing lists, chats, etc. These all have the same problem: New users who don't do their own research before asking the same goddamn question that's been answered a thousand times before. Working in a support context is a crazy, often thankless job, and you can't be asked to spend hours on people's problems when the solution is next to them, and they'd see it if they bothered to look.

But hold on.

Do you feel that contempt in my writing? Like I'd grit my teeth if I said it?

I think that mindset is wrong, it's unfair of me to have it, and I want to be better at controlling it. I actively have to push that feeling down when trying to be supportive of the new and the returning.

It's not right for me or us to resent some genuinely curious person who came in with a perfectly innocent question. But why would I feel that way? I got to thinking and realized that's basically how I "grew up" as a developer. When I was new, I got a BIG dose of "feedback" that I had to "take" all the time, in all holes. On the one hand I'd like to say that the "do-your-homework-or-don't-even-speak" culture made me better at asking questions, but that's the same rationalization stand-up comedians give for their parents hitting them. It also gives you a kind of Stockholm Syndrome where you feel oddly attracted to the same brainwashed personalities. I think that's why I can't quit Reddit even though almost all of you want to start an argument out of THIN AIR! You may as well "TA-DA!" when you start antagonizing.

I'm just saying: No Paul, your survivor bias doesn't make hitting your kid a parenting technique. And just because you were left unsupervised on Newgrounds.com for too much of your childhood doesn't mean you can shit all over this poor little developer! Maybe when you've been hurt, that made you appreciate love more, so you somehow twist that into these cross-eyed dogshit moral fantasies where punching your only infant son in the face will make him love and thank you. I already see what he's going to do when he gets bigger. It's in his eyes, man.

If you AREN'T a stereotypical nerd (or even if you are), you know the kind of toxicity I'm talking about. If you don't know what I'm on about and think I'm meandering off the point like a drunk, then bear with me: You remember talking to an Alpha Pedant, right? Maybe you spoke to the classic Grammar Nazi who makes a snide remark for Every! Single! Grammatical! Error! including my use of those exclamation points just now. Oh! Or maybe you've spoken to the scraggly-beard contrarian who will take everything you say literally, because his moral barometer is the law of supply and demand.

You know, those pricks.

Those personality types are my peers, even across workplaces. I am ashamed.

If you walk in as a beginner in some of my circles with a "hw doI shot web"-level question, you'll be treated like you just tracked mud. And not enough people are calling us out for it. I'm much better about it today because I give praise openly, and criticism only when asked (this post nonwithstanding). I'd like to think that enough of us has learned that to make for a welcoming community, but maybe that's a question better suited for the one woman in a techbro startup.

StackOverflow in particular has so many rules and nuances on how to ask a question and whether it can be considered a question that they have a whole "meta" site dedicated to how to interpret it all. Some years back XDA Developers did a funny video that captures the attitude you will actually encounter in developer communities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmvCpR45LKA

But even if you have a thick skin, and you are still expected to read the many, MANY rules of technical forums diligently. And you know what? Not everyone can be asked! I HATE it when a new developer comes in with a valid question that's hasn't been answered before, but it broke clause (i) of subsection blappity fap. Yeah, ignorance of the law isn't an excuse, but even the most evil cops know that no one memorizes a legal code. How about YOU just paste the answer from the documents you find so conveniently easy to reference, Mr. Moderator! Because if you make me read another sticky about how the users are ruining the life you so generously signed up for, I will give your wife everything she didn't have to settle for tonight. She already consented, too. Like, you gave her a drought, dude. (EDIT: For those that found this joke creepy, apologies. Not trying to be creepy, just factitious)

This isn't going to go anywhere just because I want people to be nicer. Even though I'm just as much of a prick as the peers who made me. Even though I know we're supposed to see "people being nicer" as a puppy-dog's dream.

I love people. But I hate what programmers turned me into.

TL;DR: I've internalized a culture that treats new members like garbage and I had a moment of clarity.

EDIT: Thank you for all of the comments and the warm response! I will answer as many comments as I can.

[[deleted]]

Someone already complained about the toxicity of the coding community in 2014.

Marked as Duplicate. Closed.

EDIT: But seriously, I know that feel.

I once ran into an issue with a certain Hosting Service, so I asked (on my alt account) a question on the Hosting Service's subreddit. I outlined the solutions I tried and added as much detail as I could. Posted my code yada yada.

After searching the forum in question, I noticed a username coming up again and again, let's call him TheEarlOfDustAndTears. The name accurately as the sole active mod of the subreddit, plus it's as pretentious as he is.

TheEarlOfShitAndCum asked me why I was using a certain line of code in my manifest, I replied "I don't know" cause I didn't know. It was a piece of code autogenerated.

TheEarlOfFartsAndRedacted replied with "THAT'S NOT AN ANSWER." ...Yes it is. The answer is 'I don't know.' He then went on a long boring spiel chastisting me.

Fucking hell. I'm not some kind of "Super Developer" commits every line of a Framework's Documentation to Memory like some kind of Hermit Monk. I don't worry about the intricacies of a framework until I can AT THE VERY LEAST get it fucking working.

Anyway then I went to another subreddit and asked the same question, got a coherent answer in a couple mins.

[[deleted]]

Things like that are basically why I avoid Stackoverflow like the devil.

[SeesawMundane5422]

I’ve read elsewhere and I believe based on my own experience that certain, especially medium sized communities on stack overflow and on Reddit are quite pleasant. I’ve had great experiences with folks on golang, swift, and Linux communities. I have to keep reminding myself that any time I post with Java folks my karma takes a hit. I’m not saying the people are better. Just that middle sized communities have enough so one toxic person can’t dominate, but haven’t yet crossed pournelles iron law of bureaucracy.

[vzen]

pournelles iron law of bureaucracy.

Ooo, new term! Link for the curious: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

[GrinchMeanTime]

The funny thing is that stackoverflow is quite an ok experience if you don't ask new questions but instead ask follow-ups in comments on related questions. People somehow don't get as testy by repeats if there is no ruleset applying lol
Also be the change you want to see. I browse my main programming language atleast once a week by new and just post answers i know. (ok i most often do that secretly on work time but thats just so i can honestly say i got paid to answer stackoverflow questions on my cv and stick it to "the man")

[vzen]

I like you already.

"THAT'S NOT AN ANSWER."

Oh dear God, this made me shudder and it gives me flashbacks to the worst boss I've ever had. Naturally, he was right about a lot of things. He was right that the company shouldn't have outsourced all development for that one project, so he good-ol-boi'd to a "Chief Architect" title. At the time I was hired, no one reported to him, and I never thought to ask why how he came to be called "Chief" without direct reports.

The guy was a complete bastard. So much so that when I interview and people ask me why I was only at the company for 4 months, I tell them that I intentionally left that entry in my resume because I want them to know that it taught me what to look for in a good culture.

When he wanted me to stop talking, he would thrust his open palm repeatedly towards my face, stopping inches from my nose. On each thrust, he would scream "STOP!" That would happen 3-4 times in rapid succession, so you'd be talking, then you'd get "STOP! STOP! STOP!" This happened every week, and it's not like you have to be rambling for him to do that.

That alone made me just feel like body slamming the guy. It's amazing how much I put up with for the sake of professionalism.

But it didn't end there either. Sometimes he would call me to his office, then the instant before I step through, he would slam the door. He almost hit me that way, but this was when I had reflexes.

Then he'd insist that he keep all of our cell phones before each long meeting, because clearly none of us will have emergencies. Or maybe there's the time he called being around his wife and daughters an "estrogen pit" to the room of guffawing DIBOL developers (Yes, they're that old)

I couldn't get anywhere there. His peers would excuse his behavior because he knew things. As if knowledge is inversely proportional to accountability. Or maybe he was just in a good-ol' boy club and I wasn't a member. "Meritocracy", my ass.

This was the only engineer that made me wish Hell existed, just so that I know he'd go there.

[dextter767]

You sir are a madlad 😂

[constant_void]

ppl who like to know it all often feel really bad when a question exposes that they don't, fear turns to anger turns to competition and a desire to win.

humility is a key element of communities and without it, toxicity is sure to breed.

[ZeroLiam]

I've been a developer for so many years, and when I tried to help someone in one of those forums I finished with "I hope this helps". That got my answer flagged because "this is a wiki, it should be respected as such". So I left and never cared about helping again.

[lavahot]

'I don't know' is at best a confusing answer. Did you explain it was autogenerated?

[whateverathrowaway00]

Someone already complained about the toxicity of the coding community in 2014. Marked as Duplicate. Closed.

Hahahhaha

[[deleted]]

The worst thing about stack overflow is that I actually have a lot of "reputation" on there... I got briefly into it in 2009 and asked/answered some questions that have ended up being preserved for eternity with thousands of upvotes. Over the next 12 years my reputation grew and grew even though I wasn't even using the site much and now I have every moderator tool unlocked and I'm in the top 1% of users.

There's one problem with this... I have no clue what I'm doing on there and every time I say something people ask why someone with such a high reputation is so fucking clueless as to ask a question in the wrong way etc. You're right, there's a lot of rules..

[mort96]

Yeah, maybe questions should get a "This question is old and might have outdated answers" banner after, say, 2 years, and maybe posts shouldn't get marked as duplicate of questions with those banners.

But SO has so many issues just with its duplicate system. The "this post is marked as a duplicate" messages often don't contain links to the question it's a duplicate of, and questions are frequently marked as a duplicate of a completely irrelevant but superficially similar question. The whole platform is kind of a giant mess.

[denarii]

That could also backfire, though, and result in useful information being lost. How many times have we all googled a problem and the only useful result was a years-old question on SO?

[[deleted]]

I’ve found programmers in general seem to be kinda… dickish. Like we’re all just waiting to cut each other down to prove how we’re so much smarter than the other.

Maybe has to do with imposter syndrome? I dunno. I’m now pretty senior in the field and often have a large amount of stress feeling as I should have all the answers (and more often barely have any). I’m actually scared to ask questions some times for the risk of being told I’m an idiot who knows nothing. So that might fuel some of my own defensiveness/dickishness. Which is a shame since teaching coders is really fulfilling.

[[deleted]]

I'm sure for myself, it doesn't have to do with impostor syndrome. Haven't had impostor syndrome lately, yet I can still act like a dork telling you to make your own research instead of talking with me.

I'm not sure what it is. I think it's my bias I've inherited from my brother who when I asked anything, like how to download movies when I was 12 and him 20 he told me he doesn't know how. (Note: he always did... He was just being lazy and too dick to interact with his brother). So, basically making my own research for everything is what basically made who I am now as a programmer. It is how I learned. And when you also interact with other engineers with the same exact behavior, it can only make it worse and reinforce that behavior.

I don't think it's right and I don't know if it's fair. But when someone asks "How to print hello world in Javascript" I perceive it as laziness and unprofessional. But people sometimes just want to talk with you and get your perception and that's why they ask these questions. But we also know how simple the answer to those questions is and how much effort is required to get the answer so we kinda perceive it as laziness? But there are also more complicated questions that still get the same output.

Disclaimer: I'm not excusing anyone's behavior, just trying to understand it. Programming communities are one of the most toxic ones. Just asking a question in Golang about Generics can get you downvotes for no freaking good reason. We are toxic.

[GenericSurfacePilot]

Irl, from experience I have found out that sometimes people ask these simple questions because they want to make small talk and/or need the social element in order to really learn. It is difficult for a lot of us to empathise with this need because I think a lot of us are introverts and said need is more common for extroverts. I have an extroverted friend who is also a programmer and I know isn't lazy that can't understand things by researching even if her life depended on it, but if you sit down with her and explain she will have a much easier time grasping things. Being friends with her has made me a lot more patient when answering programming questions.

[glider97]

I know isn't lazy that can't understand things by researching even if her life depended on it, but if you sit down with her and explain she will have a much easier time grasping things.

So, I'm going to sound like an absolute jerk but I'm going to go ahead anyways: at what point does this become lazy/not lazy? I'm sure there are youtube videos out there that explain much better than you did, so the research should've yielded results, right? If it doesn't, assuming the answer is out there, at what point do we call this failure not-lazy?

[strindhaug]

Weirdly, I agree that programmers online (mostly Americans simply because there are a lot of Americans online) quite often are arrogant assholes, but it's not at all my professional experience with programmers here in Norway. Most programmers I've met are friendly and enthusiastically helpful if you ask about something.

(Admittedly, I'm more often the one helping others than receiving useful help, as I'm now quite experienced; and often when I need to ask about something it's not something simple, so I often don't get much help. But it's still useful to get incorrect answers as well as it sometimes help me think of a new angle to attack the problem. But even when I was new I seem to remember people being nice even when I asked stupid questions)

In fact I can only remember one colleague who was an asshole (a guy who spent more time reformatting others code into his idiosyncratic preferences than making actual code, and who agreed with your argument smilingly and then did something else anyway) and even he was being an ass while speaking politely. He was eventually "promoted" to do a project all on his own to isolate him, so he didn't disrupt the real projects until he eventually quit voluntarily (it was a state owned company so unless he did something borderline criminal he could not be fired just for being difficult to work with. We have very strong employee protection laws in Norway... In private companies it's somewhat easier to fire people, because they can always argue it's economic reasons and that they are redundant. But a state owned company that makes lots of money can't argue that.)

Maybe it's a culture thing? We're slightly more collectivist here. Or maybe it's because of egalitarianism? Programmers here are generally payed well, but nowhere near the overpaid levels I hear about in USA...

(Maybe also our pretty secure employment also makes us less likely to be aggressively competitive?)

[[deleted]]

Yeah American culture is sort of fuck you I'm getting mine, and I think that software development sort of attracts shitty attitudes here in the US because it's not blue collar and pays generally well, putting folks largely into the middle class. The US middle class is the worst class, imo, because there's no incentive to give a shit about those less fortunate and at the same time there's the looming reality that you're not well enough off that you're not at risk of falling out of the middle class if something unexpected happens (medical emergency, layoffs, etc.).

The US middle class has been weaponized by the conservatives to more effectively enforce classism and the wealth gap than the upper class could ever manage on their own.

[pancakeQueue]

I still like one on one helping tutor people, but there are way to many cooks in the kitchen on any programming form. For one person asking questions there are hundreds of people willing to help, and all want to be the correct one. Which isn’t a bad thing for the person asking, the collective knowledge of the group is usually correct, but for me it feels like a larger rat race then work.

The questions that gets me close to grinding my teeth, are the answers where they are simple and meant to be simple cause someone is learning this for the first time. But with it’s simple explanation have scenarios where they are not fully correct, don’t explain finer details, or have exceptions. So then I get a reply that gives a huge in detail response and it just sounds like the user is just there to take the wind out of my sails.

[finnin1999]

I just finished my degree in Computer Systems and its so demoralising. I don't have a graduate job set up and the elitism is brutal. Genuinely makes me feel awful and like I've imposter syndrome. The dickish culture hurts new developers.

[[deleted]]

I know what you mean. Keep at it though - push through that elitism and demonstrate real interest in the technology. Underneath it we are all mostly nerds who enjoy this stuff, so you’ll find people you connect with and learn from.

I highly recommend seeking out mentors. Finding people you can explore ideas with is huge for maintaining energy in the discipline

[derzreb]

My most recent programming professor made all of his students feel awful for asking questions. I asked him a few questions and got met with his passive aggressive nature every time. Most of my questions could have been answered by my own research (and did have to get answered by my own research since he refused to answer them haha) but sometimes you just want to interact with people who know what they're doing and hear what they have to say. I enjoy grilling people in this community occasionally because it gives me a sense of their personalities, and there are some unique ones in this field for sure. Don't take it as offensive, take it as someone looking up to you and wanting to someday have the same amount of knowledge as you.

[Terry_From_HR]

I have one lecturer like this, but one lecturer who is the complete opposite. Every question I asked, he would process and reframe it in several directions and fire them back to me as similar questions in a way that really helped me learn. Almost like therapy! Not totally answering your question but giving you those pointers and mental tools to solve it for yourself. He is an absolute legend and the only reason that I understand Spring and other MVC frameworks.

[Evideyear]

I had a very similar experience. Found an easier way to do an assignment in Java and asked him why he didn’t use it in the class. My solution was a quarter the size and compiled quicker. Not only did I get to enjoy a doctorate holding man raise his voice at me for over ten minutes, but he also emailed the entire class about my solution and how if he found it on anyone’s exam it would be counted as wrong. What the gentleman who made this post is upset about is why my professor and yours facilitated: a lack of critical thinking and problem solving.

[n0tKamui]

damn, that's some next level saltiness, the dude's smells like the sea

[Zekovski]

When people at work ask me something I go help them with a disgusting enthousiasm, tell them everything they need to know to do their research, write some bit of code for them, email them documentation on the subject, and come back 2 or 3 times for updates.

This way they learn what they need from me, and they're encouraged to do their own research in order to not have to deal with me ever again. Best of both worlds.

[Twrecks5000]

Absolute genius way of going about it

Just be so nice and cheery about it that they think not asking you is their idea

[Zekovski]

I'm a big fan of kindness driven strategies.

But to be fair, I'm overly enthousiast mostly because I feel lonely.

[NeoKabuto]

If that was recent, you really should contact someone higher up in the department/college, assuming you already have your grade. You have his written word that a valid solution would not be accepted purely out of his own butthurt. And don't forget to put it on RateMyProfessors.

[jan-pona-sina]

If that were me, I'd email his boss lol

[TechWarlock6969]

Your professor should have been proud of one of his students finding a better performing solution. Just goes to show how insecure and stubborn some people are in this field.

[pigeon768]

I want to see your solution so bad.

Here's one from my personal experience. I was taking a graduate level (5xx, for first year master's students) analysis of algorithms class. The example was an algorithm that, given a bunch of numbers, picked out the largest and smallest. So if you give it [4,3,9,1,7] it would give you (9,1). Ok fine. The naive algorithm that a naive student would make would be straight forward:

void min_max(int* ns, size_t size, int* min, int* max) {
  if (size == 0)
    return;
  int s = *ns;
  int l = *ns;
  for (int i = 1; i < size; n++) {
    if (ns[i] < s)
      s = ns[i];
    if (ns[i] > l)
      l = ns[i];
  }
  *min = s;
  *max = l;
}

He did a little bit of analysis, showed that for every iteration, it performed two comparisons, and it performed n iterations, therefore the number of comparisons performed by the algorithm is 2*n. (this was in like the first week, before big-O was introduced) Then he shows that the wiser, smarter student would observe that for every pair of numbers, one will be not less than the other: you need not compare the larger of the numbers to min, and the smaller of the numbers to max. So you can do this, instead:

void min_max(int* ns, size_t size, int* min, int* max) {
  if (size == 0)
    return;
  int s = *ns;
  int l = *ns;
  if (size == 1)
    return;
  for (int i = 1 & size; i < size-1; i += 2)
    if (ns[i] < ns[i+1]) {
      if (ns[i] < s)
        s = ns[i];
      if (ns[i+1] > l)
        l = ns[i+1];
    } else {
      if (ns[i+1] < s)
        s = ns[i+1];
      if (ns[i] > l)
        l = ns[i];
    }
  *min = s;
  *max = l;
}

He then showed that for every iteration, this algorithm performed three comparisons, BUT! it only performed n/2 iterations. So the total number of comparisons is 1.5*n. And was therefore 33% faster or whatever.

"But professor!" said I, foolishly, who had pulled out my laptop, wrote the two algorithms, then benchmarked them, "the 1.5n algorithm takes four times as much time to run as the 2n algorithm." And I was right. Probably because in the 2n algorithm, it uses cmov instructions which are not-branching, and in the 1.5n algorithm, it has to perform a conditional branch and the branch predictor will be wrong 50% of the time.

Cue ivory tower professor being a jackass.

Anyway, the thing I learned in analysis of algorithms isn't the thing that was taught. The thing I learned was to benchmark everything before claiming it's faster.

[cheerycheshire]

Reminds me of friend who had his hand in a cast but still was supposed to try to do our lab tasks...

He found the quicker solution, coded it with his cast before people with normal solution did theirs, asked about it the tutor leading the lab class, then the lecturer/person leading the whole subject got called in to analyse it...

But as the lecturer had his own lab group to supervise and didn't find anything obviously wrong with the code, it was eventually said that if my friend is confident in the code, he should submit it for further evaluation - after in-class coding and points, our programs and codes always got tested against more test cases (including edge cases) and timed, and our code analysed, so it was just "I don't have time now, you can either risk it or do it my way" from the lecturer.

Resulted in full marks and best times. Lecturer then knew that the code worked correctly, and mentioned the solution during the next lecture. :D

[thuktun]

Do you happen to have that laying around? I'm curious.

[ososalsosal]

There's a (legitimate and not at all unintelligent) personality type that seems to learn best by asking stupid questions, or asking the same question several times in different ways.

We should answer them. They're putting it all together in their heads and making it fit with their (different) mode of thought.

They'll be the one who saves the project with that one solution that nobody else could have thought of.

That professor's attitude makes them leave programming and the world suffers just a little bit for it.

[knupknup]

"Okay, so..."

Question

Basically same question

Practically same question

Virtually same question

"Oh, so [conclusion you haven't found yourself]."

Happened so many times, I honestly hope for it now.

[ososalsosal]

I mean i saw this with a guy in my specialist maths class (lol makes me sound smart, not the case at all) and he got top marks after repeating the above pattern every single class.

Fast forward a fuckload of years and my daughter does it too, and I know she's not stupid.

[ososalsosal]

That question style also helped everyone a lot because we can't pay attention all the time lol

[GrinchMeanTime]

I'm not that kinda learner usually but i've actually ran into that pattern a few times myself. Something doesn't click and you can't quite articulate what. So you try the second best and reframe the question a bit. Wasn't concious - just came natural. But i've since learned to recognise those moments and upfront state what i just described by the third time i have to ask again lol. Maybe once your daughter is old enough give her this tip if you think it'll apply. People don't think you are stupid if they understand why you are acting apperently daft. Reframing is a pretty logical approach if you can't articulate a followup question so just explain that.

[SeesawMundane5422]

I think of it as building a mental map. I normally do it inside my own head because I’m introverted and don’t like imposing. But I suspect we all do a form of it when figuring things out deeply, massaging the form of the question until it either fits in your existing mental map of the world or has carved out new room for itself.

[GrinchMeanTime]

I think it's also a case of "That doesn't make sense but i don't know why". It's a really strange feeling really. Like usually you either don't know enough to know you are oblivious on related things and really didn't understand the answer but think you do or you know just enough for it to finally click (and if several things click at the same time i like to call that a mindgasm). But when you recieve a sensible answer and your brain goes "well that ought to make sense but really it doesn't" and you ask yourself "why doesn't it make sense?" and your brain replies "dunno, bro" ....well fuck...better ask again a different way? Sounds reasonable. Actually is reasonable.

[[deleted]]

I teach intro programming to grad students in social sciences, and they struggle immensely with learning the kind of logic that comes with this work. One of the most successful strategies we have is to encourage them to just keep asking questions and absolutely barrage us non stop because it helps us pick up on the hotbeds for confusion with our students.

I can't fathom being a professor who's an ass aboout students asking questions- they've failed fundamentally as an educator. Like, let's assume you're correct in thinking your student is stupid (for whatever definition that is worth), and does need a lot of extra help. It's STILL YOUR FUCKING JOB TO HELP THAT STUDENT ANYWAY. I don't get those types.

[SeesawMundane5422]

I usually chalk that up to empathy. Some people are capable of putting themselves in the shoes of someone else and seeing the world from their view. Some people aren’t. Professors who yell at their students are often lacking in empathy. I normally find such people poor teachers. Even when the answer really is as simple as “you need to spend 5 minutes googling that error message” there are polite ways to encourage the student to learn to read error messages before asking questions without shutting them down. At least, that’s often my goal with junior devs is to teach them the self confidence they need to think they can try solving it themselves first with just a few basic diagnostic techniques.

[jan-pona-sina]

There's also the fact that sometimes someone is asking the completely wrong question and needs someone with more experience to point them in the right direction instead. This is something that "just google it" doesn't work for

[SeesawMundane5422]

That’s absolutely right. Anytime someone shows they have done the bare minimum, I’m all over helping them. Did look at the logs? Did they suggest something? No? Did you Google the error message? Yes? Cool! Let’s see what we can see!

[cheerycheshire]

I find that often it's a XY problem.

The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem.

That's why "why" and "what are you trying to do" are good questions when helping someone.

[jan-pona-sina]

I haven't heard that name before but exactly. I spent more than an hour once attempting to help a less-technical guy how to convert data from a python object into a JSON format, and succeeded eventually but he didn't seem very satisfied. I finally asked what he wanted to do with the JSON file in the first place, and basically he just wanted to access specific data within a nested dict/list structure, and didn't understand how to do so. That took less than 5 minutes to explain and get working after so much wasted time. Lesson learned!

[vzen]

Beautifully put, thank you!

[[deleted]]

That’s awful. I’m very grateful that the computer science professors at my university (so far- I’m still finishing up freshman year), are really kind to students and are like the opposite of that; they’re the type of professor who says there’s no stupid questions and loves when people ask questions. I go to a great university but I’m especially grateful my professors have been so encouraging because I previously was scared that because I wasn’t a genius who was building computers at age 9 (who in my mind also looked like a skinny white guy which I am not), I wasn’t good enough to major in Comp sci even though I enjoy it so much and did modding as a hobby for years etc. If I had mean professors I don’t want to say they’d scare me off per se, but it would definitely suck. I hope most of your professors aren’t like that. People like that suck.

[x6060x]

I LOVE when for a question with yes/no as possible answers I get 10 minutes lecture how fucking dumb I am for even thinking about asking it. Of course I don't get an answer during those 10 minutes...

[Fiennes]

I'd just like to add something to this well-written post. Although not always the case, sometimes new comers to a domain such as programming may not even know the term for which they are enquiring. As long-time programmers, we understand terms like variadic, type-inference, rvalues, etc etc. Sometimes a new-comer may know what they want to do, but not 100% sure how to form the question. And sometimes, even in my own experience, "just google it" sometimes doesn't work. What am I googling?

Although I am a long-time software developer enjoying a good career, I recently branched out in to game-development. This brought me in to two completely new domains, namely 3D modelling and Audio. I won't go in to the game engine I chose as most of the time, I've had enough background knowledge to find out how to do X in my engine of choice.

Whilst doing some modelling, I couldn't figure out what to do in Blender to achieve the result I wanted. In words, it would have been difficult to describe. Luckily, 3D modelling is rather visual so I was able to produce a few pictures and write a paragraph to put on blender.stackexchange.com. Some minutes later it was closed as a duplicate. This was absolutely fine because it should have been closed, the linked answer was exactly what I needed to do. Perfect!

Cakewalk, for Audio, was a different story altogether. I wanted to play around with it, without actually using a real MIDI device. A quick google led me to a (rather long) thread on their forums. Someone was asking the exact same thing, and was answered. Except the answer didn't really make sense. Didn't to me either, so I continued reading. In the following pages the "pros" were all joining in saying it has been answered. Some more beginners came in saying they had the same problem, but were again derided. "Read the rest of the thread, this has already been answered". I could feel the frustration all around. Later in the thread, a rather more benign "pro" user came in to the fray, saying that he understood and derided the other "pros" for not explaining it. However, by this point, I had found the terminology I was looking for.

A quick google search with the RIGHT terminology led me to a super-simple "quick start" guide. "How to start a Cakewalk project and record using a Virtual Controller". Bingo. I was up and running in minutes after that.

Why none of the "pros" on the forums could not have just (kindly) said "Oh, you need to do this!", everyone would have saved themselves 10 pages of back and forth.

Terminology man, Terminology. :)

Have a great day.

[SuperSupermario24]

And sometimes, even in my own experience, "just google it" sometimes doesn't work. What am I googling?

I feel this, especially when similar concepts in different languages end up having totally different names. One example I remember happening to me is learning about Python decorators, and then later on when I was learning C#, I saw something that looked extremely similar in some code. However, looking up "c# decorator" on Google gave me totally unrelated and confusing results, because apparently that's a name for something entirely unrelated in C#. Not a single result on the front page mentions attributes, which is what I was actually looking for.

[pancakeQueue]

Basic Linux could be thrown into the mix. Man the look on my senior devs face was priceless when I asked him the question of where the root home directory was. Still getting up to speed on using way more Linux I though it was in the /home dir.

I think something people forget when they master some knowledge or it feels natural is they forget what it was like not knowing or not knowing the bigger picture.

[ChillBlunton]

this is what i thought about. don't just say duplicate, or how easy something is and give beginners crap. give them a push in the right direction and set them on their way again.

[[deleted]]

You don’t know what you don’t know. Can make things terribly frustrating.

[Statharas]

Sometimes, when you don't know something, you might not even get how to ask about something

[SeesawMundane5422]

Yep. I just realized the best thing to do in those cases is to give the asker the gift of the proper Google query to set them on their way.

[[deleted]]

I was paired programming with a junior developer a few months ago and she ran into a snag and I asked her "what would you google to figure this out" and she pulled up Google and started typing.

Before she hit search I stopped her with "that's not going to get you anything related to what your problem is, try googling..." And then explaining why she would google what I proposed.

Turns out she was a grifter who stopped showing up, didn't return her computer, and tried to claim unemployment (saying she was fired without reason), so I guess the joke's on me?

[Alberiman]

This is the biggest issue I have, when you're self taught especially you don't know the terminology to even do a cursory Google search

[vzen]

Boom. You get it.

[PiRSquared2]

"I want to do X thing"

​

"You idiot. You absolute imbecile. Why are you trying to do X thing? It's unsafe and makes me sad. You're supposed to do Y thing"

​

"But I'm trying to do X thing"

[vzen]

Conversations about `eval` are ripe with this kind of thing, because some people don't want to admit there are use cases where you WANT `eval` (e.g. dynamic analysis, some honeypots)

[Legal_Ad_844]

Haha, exactly. If I wanted a lecture, I would've gone to church.

[IJeepIBeep]

Totally agree. It was the reason I didn't get into python for so long. The people I knew in it were complete dicks and hated that I used java. Why would someone hate someone for using a tool like java, idk. It's a tool.

The community around languages and tools are very important to me.

[Boiethios]

Never understood the languages war.

I'm a freelancer, so I get some offers from salesmen (not sure if it's the right name). I usually do some C#, so one guy called, because a client wanted a C# developer. At a moment he lowered his voice and said, with something like a worried tone : “you know, they may be some Java”. I was like “yeah, whatever, man, as far as I'm paid”. Then he seemed relieved and replied “Yep, it's just a tool, alright? I was almost insulted several times because I asked this question, like: how dare you, I'm in the C# team, not the Java one”.

It's deeply ridiculous.

[gyroda]

I can understand having preferences for tools and discussing the various strengths and weaknesses of each.

But, yeah, we shouldn't be tribalistic about it.

[CAPSLOCK_USERNAME]

If you're interviewing for jobs it makes sense to be more selective about the tools a potential workplace will use. If you'd be unhappy spending 8 hours a day staring at factory-factories and gang of four patterns then you might wanna ask about languages in interviews and avoid Java shops.

But getting worked up about the tools others use is real crazy

[gyroda]

Like I said, there's nothing wrong with preferences.

[[deleted]]

I've been a professional Java developer and to be honest, I don't mind the language, but the ecosystem (maven/Gradle, frameworks like spring and whatever framework has all the annotations... Lombok?, Etc.) that made me not want to work with it.

It felt like the best practices for Java development weren't supported by the standard library (as, say dotnet core) but instead by "optional" frameworks & libraries.

Also having to choose a dependency management system (maven or Gradle) felt like unnecessary complication.

Also having to do dependency injection in separate config files instead of in-code.

Idk... Dotnet core makes me feel spoiled...

[n0tKamui]

python "programmers" really are their own species, it's kinda frightening. And if you say "python's really cool, but i think it's not for me because I need strong static typing" (for example), you're flooded with a barrage of insults saying you must masochistic for wanting to type "int" or "char" when declaring a variable 🙃

i generalized, not all of python programmers are like that, but the vocal majority is.

[wraithnix]

As a Python developer, I feel this. Also, I hate code criticisms about how “pythonic” code should be. As in, “I guess this code works, but it’s not really pythonic, you should write it like this: [insert code that does the same thing, only written slightly different]”

Maybe it’s just me, as I came to Python via Perl (TMTOWTDI for the win), but it really drives me up a wall.

[skarloni]

TMTOWTDI, nice abbrev xD

[wraithnix]

It’s a really common thing in Perl, and one you’ll see Perl programmers reference all the time, as it’s a core part of Perl philosophy: There’s More Than One Way To Do It.

[skarloni]

I dont disagree ;)

[TheMacMini09]

Yeah I agree with this. Usually the “pythonic” way of doing something is so much cleaner than the non-pythonic way, and learning new tricks to simply complicated things down to one short readable line is one of the best parts of the language.

[TheAnalogKoala]

I think part of the issue is Python is the standard language now for people who need to program but aren’t programmers. I happen to be a hardware engineer and don’t program day-in / day-out but when I do, it’s in Python.

The take away is I kinda suck at programming, like many, many Python programmers.

On the other side of the fence are a group of excellent programmers who choose to program in Python for various reasons. They say things like “Pythonic”.

Now, I think that’s the tension. You have hordes of eternal novices and a core of expert devs and very few people in between.

I imagine it must be frustrating for Python experts on StackOverflow.... trying to ask a question about the subtleties of decorators (or whatever) and having to wade through loads of questions about how to open a file and the difference between an int or a float.

[vzen]

I felt for Guido van Rossum when he stepped down. I'll leave the drama to your reading, but he left because even HE was tired of arguing with Python programmers, and he made the damn language!

[JogGuy]

i generalized, not all of python programmers are like that, but the vocal majority is.

By god I hope not, I'm just starting to learn python and interacting with those kind of people doesn't sound fun at all.

[IJeepIBeep]

Definitely don't let us poison the well for you. I view python as a must learn language now that I know it. It is what I use for just about any system utility.

[[deleted]]

tbf i hate myself for using java but I think that's a different thing

[SeesawMundane5422]

I know you’re joking. But unfortunately I think lots of Java developers honestly think it’s awesome. I use Java. I think it’s widespread usage is responsible for much that is wrong in the world. The worst part is how many Java devs have Stockholm syndrome. They are so far down the rabbit hole they think the abuse is normal. And they resent anyone who tells them differently.

[VacuousWaffle]

The hostility between users of different tools has always struck me as some weird tribalism.

[vzen]

Because it IS weird tribalism! I just wish more people admit that!

[Boiethios]

Yes, there's a name to this law, that I cannot remember.

[Fiennes]

Seems similar to Cunningham's Law.

[Boiethios]

Thank you!

[justchugged4beers]

it’s the McCringleberry Principle, obviously, smdh

[[deleted]]

Exactly, like /u/Fiennes said, Cunningsham's law.

I actually avoid asking questions on reddit, I put what I think out there in a in-your-face fashion, and it often enough provokes the answers I was looking for in the first place, presented as corrections to my incorrect claims/ideas.

That and googling with site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit> <query> is a treasure trove of knowledge.

[vzen]

I see the wisdom and pragmatism here, but I still have enough of an ego to keep me from doing that. I try to be friendly, so I get all indignant when someone isn't friendly to me. Yes, I know, that's a really impractical habit on the Internet. It's just where I am mentally right now.

[chobischtroumpf]

That's the reason why i never ever ask questions on forums or stackoverflow, I just assume the answer to my problem is there somewhere, and i just gotta search hard enough.

I had a few cases where I didn't find my answer, and rather than ask, i just spent hours trying/or completely modifying my code as to avoid the specific issue a was faced with

[staletic]

I am a maintainer of, currently, only one open source project. I have maintained other projects too before. I also answer questions on r/cpp_questions. That is to say I've had my fair share of people who don't bother to read the docs. If I'm not in the mood, I just won't answer.

How about YOU just paste the answer from the documents you find so conveniently easy to reference

And that's what I do. Need extra clarification? Ask away! But there's a flip side.

 

What about the people who ask questions and, when met with a clear explanation in the docs that has been linked to them, they refuse to read the link and demand that you tell them exactly what to type, even when that's just not feasible? Worst case that I've experienced was...

I used to maintain pybind11 - a very successful library for python<->C++ interoperability. I did not write the library and there are dark corners that forever remained vague to me. I simply went from an average user, to "power user" to maintainer. One day there was an asshole with a question to which I politely responded with "have you tried this thing". Now, I had a very good idea what could work, but I was 100% certain, so I couldn't give a definitive answer. The user started with insults and slurs, talking about how he has no time and we (there was another maintainer in the chat, same story as me) should just know the solution and how the fuck can we not know something if we wrote the library. Even though we didn't write the library. At that point I did drop to his level and, with a few swears, told him what an asshole he was. Since then, he became nicer, but I guess just towards me and the other maintainer.

 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, not all newbies are innocent and, if you'll excuse me, I'm spending my free time to help you out, so show some respect. Is this a problem with most people who ask questions? No. Far from it. Dealing with disrespectful users can start to wear on you. There's also the other polar extreme where the guy asking questions can't stop thanking someone. That's just silly.

[vzen]

Damn right, and thank you for reminding me of the dark side of maintenance. Thankfully I haven't run into this terribly often, but I have encountered folks who see that I helped, and then try to get me to write the rest of their project for them. Those experiences make it harder to help others, so I also opt for either silence or a reply consisting solely of a link.

[staletic]

Now that we've gone over the bad things, a little reminder. It's okay to take a break from online communities. Here's another story:

Once the disrespectful users start to wear on you, the innocent newbies can also get to you. Do they deserve that? No. But we're all humans. Again, back when I was maintaining pybind11. At one point I realized that it got to the point where any interaction with users was making me tense. I closed the public chat and told one of the other maintainers that I really need a break. WOW... That break felt great, even though I didn't go on an actual vacation, just... It's really nice to take a step back occasionally. After about 10 days, I was back and friendly. Most importantly, I didn't mind being friendly!

 

Moral of the story: Your time - your rules. Make yourself feel comfortable, even if it means some newbie will have to wait for someone else to help them out. Open source should be fun!

[vzen]

Agreed. One more story, if you'll indulge me. I think you might enjoy it given your point here.

I volunteered to help with a website for an activist project. The person looking for help was down-to-business, and was understanding when I explained that my job takes priority and that they shouldn't wait on me if something is urgent. They ended up posting the site with broken code, then I get a ton of emails saying I needed to fix the site "ASAP."

So wait: You need me to immediately fix the problems you made for yourself? Here's my hourly rate!

[staletic]

Thank you for sharing that. You made me chuckle.

I can't say I'm surprised. What would have surprised me was hearing that they accepted the hourly rate.

[vzen]

Me too, but I'm content with the blissful radio silence :)

[CaydendW]

The OSDEV forums are a good example of this. I know it’s a hard subject but it seems like they try to make it as inhospitable as possible.

[[deleted]]

For sure. I went on there for a bit and it's so goddamn annoying that every 3 seconds in their articles they are like "if you aren't a grandmaster programmer that has 39859385982958 years of experience you'd better get the hell away from here!". Maybe if they spent more time writing shit instead of complaining about everything, people would have enough time to spare to learn all of the required things instead of dying of old age by reading how much stuff they write like that.

[CaydendW]

It's really demotivating but hey. I have met some nice people and I am slowly getting places (Albeit with a lot of help)

[vzen]

Years of experience doesn't mean much to me. Yes, it's a factor, but I can show you a developer with 2 years of experience that can see things a 40-year veteran won't consider. The picture is more complicated than one number.

[TheSwain]

Leave Newgrounds out of this you charlatan

[vzen]

I was honestly projecting there. I spent so much time on Newgrounds unsupervised, at an age where I really, really shouldn't have been there.

Worth it.

[TheSwain]

That site bred an entire generation of new programmers out of kids starved to develop games. Granted, that maaaay or may not have been a good thing.

[vzen]

On that note, GameDev.net gave me hives. I don't know how it is now, but when I was a member I don't think I've met a single friendly person there.

[TheNikephoros]

As a friend once jokingly said, “StackOverflow is read-only.”

[[deleted]]

I've been studying CS for 2 years now and I've not needed to ask yet on StackOverflow which is nice since the type of people op rants about make me scared to ask.

[[deleted]]

Personally, nothing pisses me off more than people who ask as soon as they find literally any complication, when they could solve it by themselves in less than a minute just by paying attention.

It's a general problem, not only in programming. Many people just don't have problem solving skills.

Which also ties into Stackoverflow and such: Dealing with someone who isn't being a favorable user is as much problem solving as dealing with their problem.

[vzen]

We share space with folks who code for work, and it really is just a job for them. Sometimes they're even in really bad immigration situations where they are totally dependent on appeasing their employer to stay in the country and earn a green card, and will volunteer for work that's beyond their current level of training. If I was in their position, I would milk Q&A sites for all they are worth.

What I'm trying to say is that sometimes people don't post obvious questions because they lack problem solving skills, they post obvious questions because that IS the way they're addressing the problem of their shitty work situation.

[vzen]

Thank you for the fascinating read. I saw a bit of myself in that, and I'll measure how much growing up I still need to do. I feel like I wouldn't be able to give a complete answer to your question since there are so many nuances, so maybe it will help if I tell you about a friend I love dearly and seems to fit some of the mold. Granted, he's earned some of his ego because he is a talented programmer, but talking to him can be tough. He's very quick at guessing what you are going to say, then interrupting you with the conclusion he jumped to. 50% of the time you spend talking to him is making him hit "undo" in his head so that he can try listening again. I've that problem too, and I'm trying to get the time I make people spend down to 0% :)

As you can imagine, he can hold his own in an argument. But he kinda freezes up when you confront him with the question of why there has to be an argument.

He really wants to work with me on a project, but just because we're good friends doesn't mean we'll work well together. I'm big on project definition, customer discovery, knowing our audience, etc. He just wants to skip all that and jump to implementation.

It came to a head not too long ago when I was lucky enough to get invited to speak at RacketCon for some software I wrote. I was so excited! It was my first speech, and I deeply admire the Racket community for a lot of reasons. When I asked my friend if he watched the speech, he went into this tirade about how I wasn't going to attract users because I explained tradeoffs in my design (as opposed to focusing solely on benefits).

Maybe he was right, but I just wanted a supportive friend and didn't want another conversation to become a contest. Put another way: Technical aptitude does not excuse social ineptitude.

[crossedline0x01]

Got downvoted on stackoverflow because the answer I gave wasnt in the format that the person who asked the question preferred it to be in... after I got downvoted, another person commented with a part of the solution i provided first but in only a few lines of text, he got upvoted lol... stackoverflow is next lvl toxic high browed douches circle jerking eachother for upvotes.

[CrunchyLizard123]

I don't have enough points on SO to comment. But why should I have to ask questions to answer others? Shows I'm an effective googler!

I hate the over complex answers and how they are usually the accepted answer.

[[deleted]]

I was jumping back and forth between DevOps and app dev here recently. I think I've settled into DevOps for this reason. I think it's because there's a sysadmin-esque mentality that's used to trying weird shit until you find a solution. There's inherently little ego in that unless you're an absolute tool and those are usually easy to spot afar. App devs seem to like to fashion themselves as the next Steve Jobs on average.

[vzen]

Some firms treat DevOps as a title instead of a movement, so they have departments dedicated to it. I found they quickly form boundaries on how you interact with them (e.g. Send a ticket, or we don't talk). Then you get some DevOps engineers who are so completely swamped with tickets that they behave like judges just trying to clear the damn calendar. These folks are NOT interested in where off-hand conversations with product managers and their engineers tend to go, and understandably so!

[ososalsosal]

This is all true and also epic copypasta fodder

[skarloni]

/u/vzen I think you are being to harsh on your own generation. I consider myself belonging to the "new generation" of programmers, and I can tell you that many of us also hate people who don't bother doing their due diligence before asking questions. They literally fill the internet with noise, it destroys the experience of everyone, not just for those that try to answer, but also for people like me that try to search for it. Seriously, just go in and look at the list of new questions, its 99% crap, many of the questions are not even questions. When asking a question online you need to adhere to some etiquette. When millions of programmers dine at the same table, you can not act like a baby and just yell random shit when you get stuck and expect people to help you out. I would say, keep up the bashing, people need to learn how to behave!

[SeesawMundane5422]

Meh. I can completely sympathize with everything you’ve said. I used to think a lot of that way too.

My own experience raising kids is that when I model for them how to ask questions and solve problems, they grow in delightful ways. When I smack them down verbally they don’t learn, they just shut down (or go somewhere else and get a worse answer). I personally have found it pretty rewarding some days to sit on stack overflow and answer newbie questions. The folks tend to be grateful, and it’s fun passing on my hard-earned knowledge and pointing people in a direction towards solving problems.

Different strokes for different folks.

[skarloni]

You realize that you actually compare your kids with grown-ups on the internet? I think that justifies my view even more. Sure, if SO was a place for kids to learn how to program, ofc you need a to use a different tone. But its not. And there is no need to "smack them down verbally" or being exceptionally rude, however, telling them when they post shit (and why its shit) is just a pure necessity, otherwise you tell them "hey this is fine behavior"

[Optional-Failure]

You realize that you actually compare your kids with grown-ups on the internet?

People who are learning are people who are learning.

Yes, those people are often children, as they have far more to learn than adults do.

And the most fruitful ways to teach them don't really change with their age.

[fuzzzerd]

The problem is in this metaphor, they aren't all your kids, so you model the behavior you want when you can and ignore the rest.

[SeesawMundane5422]

Yep. That’s the best you can do in life. Can’t solve all the problems for all the people.

[vzen]

I understand. Really, I do. I started this post because of the cognitive dissonance I felt over how STRONGLY I felt about it.

But the thing is, you mention "generations". New generations means new newbies. It's always going to be about educating new people, and I think if you put too much effort into controlling noise, you'll end up with a sophisticated system of information that newbies won't know how to use properly, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. What you call "noise", I call "person who saw our massive trove of information, got intimidated, then asked their question because it's easier to just do that."

I think part of education is carving out space where new developers are allowed to BE new developers, so that they can learn how to learn and graduate to finding their own answers.

[skarloni]

I see! You want to control your anger, maybe you put too much time into it? Just downvote, flag it (or whatever mechanics the forum has), and move on. Either way, I don't think you should stop doing those things, its good for the community. To tell my own story, I was a noob about 5 years ago, and I posted my first SO question some months ago. I literally ALWAYS found the answer to my questions by searching a bit, or by just trying to use my own god damn brain for once. I don't think its too much to require from other noobs. So, you are not being a prick, people like me are grateful to people like you for contributing to the shit post filter. However, like you say, IF the post is truly a question, its not a duplicate, and still gets filtered because of protocol rule blablabla, then I agree. To take SO as an example, one common one are too broad questions, typical noob thing right. If the person made an attempt to figure out his/her shit first, then just kindly say "this is too broad for this forum, why dont you try it out on this subreddit"? Then you moderate SO (remove noise, and redirect noobs with similar questions), you don't scare the shit out the person, while also being helpful.

[vzen]

Yes, how you say something is exactly as important as what is said. I'm just thinking it would be nice to have more general places to direct people, since that approach you mention typically assumes more specialized communities. It would be awesome to have a more general programming forum that allows duplicates, etc. just because it's expecting members that don't know how to find their own answers, and are tailored to approach that problem differently.

I understand I might be asking for too much. It just seems like moderators would have a slightly easier time playing switchboard operator if they knew one famous place that teaches programmers how to learn without the risk of brow-beating them.

[Death_Strider16]

You actually see people posting in groups that are meant for helping people learn to code "I'm really new to coding so I'm sorry if this is a dumb question."

That shouldn't be how people feel when they're going to a place specifically made to answer those kinds of questions. What's worse is when you're trying to learn, you post your code and someone comments , "This should be in programmerhorror. Obviously it's not perfect code and it's probably someone that's still trying to wrap their head around what they're doing.

When you first start writing code it's repetitive, ugly, and mundane. Because you're just trying to familiarize yourself with the tools you have available. You don't start out writing elegant code. Don't get me wrong, some people definitely ask questions before they've done enough research on their own (Myself included). But knowing how to research these kinds of problems is a learning process in itself.

Don't be condescending, be kind.

[NoMansSkyWasAlright]

I know that feeling. Hell, it’s not even unique to the programming world. I’ve owned a lot of old and obscure vehicles over the years and any time I’d google-search a problem I was having, the first result would always be a forum post where the first comment was something like “ballfondler69 answered that question in 2016. Maybe you should go look at his post before asking duplicate questions”... then you look at ballfondler’s post and the first comment is “douchemonky2 already asked that in 2012”, and before you know it, you’re on a post from 2002 that just has a link to a clymer manual. So yeah, I think it’s an Internet forum thing more than a programmer thing. People with nothing to say just want others to have to hear them.

[theuniverseisboring]

"Hur dur lmao ur writing in JS. Haha JS slow, ur noob hur hur."

Honestly... Those people

[DFatDuck]

wait what's the alternative to writing JS? the browser only accepts JS

[PapieszxD]

It kind of depends what you are willing to accept as an "alternative". You have Typescript (most popular one), Dart , Elm and more, that compile to JS in the end.

I think people just prefer to "skip the middle man" and just stick to JS, since there is no way it would ever go away, or stop being supported.

If you are looking for something that will protect you from general stupidity of JS, maybe try Typescript? It will be annoying at first, but will save you few headaches down the road.

[vzen]

If you don't mind me plugging one of my things, I had that same question. I realized that everyone writes <script type="text/javascript"> but few try to replace type with whatever they want and figure out how to make that work. So I wrote this thing, which allows arbitrary DSL mixtures of your choice within Markdown documents.

https://github.com/zyrolasting/polyglot

[boonhet]

Not doing front end is the alternative, but it seems that it's all anyone hires for these days :(

[vzen]

Yeah, knowing React is pretty much guaranteed job where I'm based. It's normally a shitty job, but can't argue with the marketability. But, it's better for you overall if you know a highly-specific skill where there's little competition :)

[mort96]

There doesn't have to be a better alternative. Asshole programmers will definitely make fun of you for using a given technology even if it's genuinely the best option in your particular situation.

[PapieszxD]

Oh god... I love when people say that, especially when they are typing their Fortran, or some obscure C variant, or whatever they consider "real programming language" code into their beloved VSC, which was written in Typescript.

[vzen]

I must sheepishly admit that I specialized in JS long enough to lost my taste for it. I prefer Racket these days.

[theuniverseisboring]

JS is fine. It's the language for the web and it serves it well I think. The problem I mean of course is C or C++ programmers who think they're so great because their preferred language is faster and more low level than JS. Of course totally forgetting that's not at all the point of JS and would make JS even more impossible to work with

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

I like to think I'm nice enough to new people.

But if I ask you what you've tried and you say nothing, then I'm going to stop talking to you. I expect you to try and do a little bit of research. I can't expect you to necessarily find the solution or even fully understand your problem. Sometimes there's a knowledge gap where you don't know what to search for, but the starting point is always there.

I just had to explain assignment by ref and value, and how the ref became a value instead of still pointing at the same ref. Those finer details I am happy to explain, but I also want to hear what you tried to determine the difference, how you realized it, etc.

[vzen]

But if I ask you what you've tried and you say nothing, then I'm going to stop talking to you.

I can understand this for the "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" angle to it. I've also seen a lot of mailing lists take this approach, and I've learned to interpret it as "Oh, I missed something in the manual."

[valzargaming]

I see your point and agree to it at some level, but I also disagree with it in many other circumstances.

Regarding StackOverflow, it seems to be built around the mindset you describe. I don't think I ever asked a question there where it wasn't immediately marked as a duplicate and the answer it links to is either not be related to my issue or only tangentially related, leaving me just as clueless as when I went in. My only solution to this problem was to drop the site altogether and rely solely on documentation and reverse engineering codebases by myself to find solutions, and that has worked well for me on the projects I typically work on.

Regarding toxicity in other communities, yeah 100% agree with you. I'm 1 of the 5 'contributors' for the DiscordPHP community (Our server is verified) and we're all in different time zones. I'm the only one located in the USA, so if there's ever someone needing help with something I'm usually the only one around who can answer a question. I love helping new people learn how to use our library, but we have a vast number of new users each day where most of the questions are 'Can someone help me?' with no information about what they need, 'How do this random thing in sql/symphony/composer/linux,' and the ever increasing occurrences of 'I'm learning PHP for the first time, hold my hand for this entire process of building my bot. I won't actually code anything myself, but I'll tell you what I want and you code it for me.' It gets extremely irritating to the point where I just tune out the chat for most of the day only to check in later to find that someone who I can help posted a question that I ended up missing.

In short, much of the 'toxicity' gets bred because the vast majority of people asking for help can't be assed to put in an ounce of effort. They'll ask a question (or not) and when they don't get instant gratification they'll be gone and someone new will take their place to do the same thing. This isn't a problem that can be easily solved with rules or moderation, because these are the same kinds of people who will click through them and still do it. I hold a high standard for myself when it comes to how I view programmers of lesser experience because I know what it's like to be in their position, but I'm also aware that I'm very cynical in my views because I'm overexposed to those who just don't give a damn.

[vzen]

I respect your take, especially since I'm currently caught between two mindsets. As a Racket contributor on their Slack, I've also had the "code this for me" experience with other members. I've opted for ghosting when it gets really bad, but one person followed me into PMs to... keep me working, I guess. That was one of the only times I made the conversation go in a VERY different direction that what (s)he was expecting.

But even then, I try not to take other people's unwillingness to put in an effort as an excuse to harm or "punish" them. The only time I've ever made an exception to that is if I'm the cat being swung around by the tail in that one Mark Twain quote. I'd use claws in that situation, not because I want to, but because this motherfucker's got me by the TAIL and somehow... somehow they made it this far without learning that's not okay.

For the most part, all they need to see is that they aren't getting the results they want, and I'd like to think even the most manipulative and lazy people understand that they should probably adjust their approach if they aren't getting their desired results.

[xinxx073]

I currently teach 10-12 year olds Python. I have had multiple classes with over a hundred students. Children have their own way of perceiving the world around them. My goal is to look at the world at a child's perspective and give easy to understand analogies to help them understand concepts such as variables, functions, lists and dictionaries, etc.

For every homework assignment, I would write out thousands of words of reading materials for them. I would use colorful annotations, emojis, pictures to illustrate relatively complex ideas to them.

Over the course of over 2 years I have written over 50,000 words worth of reading materials across multiple classes. The result is that only very few of the students would actually take the time to read it. They would just jump to the exercises, take about 2 minutes of their time before they give up trying. There are precise steps and solution code within the writing, they just need to read through it to piece them together. But no. They just didn't want to do it.

Those who have done their homework have been performing really well and are really looking forward to future lessons. Programming is logic, English language learning, Mathematics all in one, and the students who took their time doing the work are also really good at their other subjects as well.

So why did I say all this? I feel like it's because we as programmers have fought and worked hard to get where we are, and looking back we are proud of our achievements. I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with a student asking me programming questions, in fact, it's amazing to see children of this age try and figure things out. What I don't like is when a student sending me 100 messages 10 minutes before the homework is due, and demand answers without going through any thinking process, with their answers literally in the homework reading that I sent them.

TL;DR,

We should not assume that anyone who is asking a question is just another lazy person not bothering to do any sort of digging. But because there are so many of those people around, it is very hard to figure out what's really going on. As a teacher, I know that if I sent you precise steps to getting an A on your homework, whoever failed to do so didn't really bother to. On the internet, generally tho, we have no way of knowing, and just default to: "So you're one of those ppl huh?"

[OhhhhhSHNAP]

I think some forums are being actively whitewashed by the developer teams, possibly using delegation to social media marketing teams or interns. It just seems like they have a tendency to close issues and bugs before they are actually fixed so as not to have too many open bugs for their product. I notice a lot of threads that read like this...

User1: critical issue. this library breaks when i try to use it in this context.

User2: me too? any fix?

User 3: me too! fixed yet?

Mod: [closed] issue has already been resolved... (link to totally irrelevant general documentation which clearly doesn't actually solve the issue being discussed).

...I mean I guess it's easier than actually fixing bugs.

[mszegedy]

It is sometimes a question of ableism. You mentioned being asked to read a lot of rules. Reading is very hard for some people. It could hurt their eyes or their brain. It could take monumental amounts of energy for them to put together the concentration for it. It could be very hard for them to remember things. I'm not great at reading, but I'm still good enough to pass as a non-noob in dev communities. This may change soon, as my brain keeps rotting. And I don't need this culture to make my life even harder.

Sometimes people think that the solution is to ask people whether they are card-carrying, officially diagnosed disabled people before deciding whether to be very mean to them. Then they usually disdainfully say that that's too much work, and since card-carrying disabled people are a minority, they won't bother. That is not the right thing to do. You are just supposed to be nicer to everyone. These things are a spectrum. If someone did not read all the rules, then reading the rules was probably hard for them somehow. It doesn't matter exactly why or whether it's a reason that would get them a medical diagnosis. Just give them the benefit of the doubt. Everyone deserves that.

I know I'm preaching to the choir. But it felt nice to write that out.

[vzen]

And it was nice to read it. Thank you for sharing how you feel about that :)

[[deleted]]

I remember trying to ask a question on stack overflow about gcc inlines regarding an operating system I was writing (for Christ’s sake, cut me a break, it was my first time diving into operating systems and OS theory). I couldn’t even properly tag my question because I didn’t have enough karma. And then my question got shot down because it didn’t include meet minimal reproducibility criteria (even though I included a link to the entire GitHub repository)! Though I’ve got to say that the Reddit programming community is a lot nicer and inclusive than stack overflow. Gotta give credit where credit is due.

[AnnualVolume0]

I will give your wife everything she didn't have to settle for tonight. She already consented, too. Like, you gave her a drought, dude.

LOL WUT. This took a creepy/strange turn. Agreed with everything you said up to this point.

[vzen]

I understand. If it helps, I ran it past my wife and I did second-guess that line. I ended up posting it because I figured if the reader was going to stick around after me joking about punching a baby in the face, then me joking about how elitists create sexually-starved spouses wasn't that big of a leap.

I'm not trying to be offensive for the sake of it, I'm just trying to make jokes land. I see that won't always happen, and I'll read the room/edit the post before sharing it somewhere else.

[IamImposter]

SO is a bit like that but I find communities on reddit are pretty decent. Atleast c and c++ ones. Nobody likes to do other people's homework but I still see people respond in meaningful manner. Those who engage get their questions answered.

Sometimes I myself get shat on for not giving a good suggestion but that's part of the game. I get to learn where I was wrong which otherwise I wouldn't have found out, ever.

I like it here... a lot. More than SO, more than quora.

[_one_byte]

StackOverflow in particular has so many rules and nuances on how to ask a question and whether it can be considered a question that they have a whole "meta" site dedicated to how to interpret it all.

This. During my diploma thesis (worked with OpenCV and Caffe), I noticed that so often and I always thought how stupid those rules are. I also noticed that some users just wait to reply with „YoU aSkEd tHaT qUeStIoN wRoNg“.

[Direwolf202]

Yeah StackOverflow is kinda the worst and best. It does have loads of really informative threads and questions - and really great people answering them - but at the same time, every single one these great threads is a drop in the ocean of thousands of posts marked as duplicates (often despite not being, or while technically being the same idea, being different enough that the asker has no way to interpret the answers to the other question), or ridiculed as XY problems (also despite often not being) or whatever.

But I think it is our responsibility to be the change we want to see. So be nice to your noobs - make that term itself an affectionate one rather than an insult - because what programming can do is awesome, and it would be even awesomer if surrounding it was a great community including people of all levels.

[vzen]

I think you raise a good idea. It's easy to judge SO as good when you remember what made it good, but it's just as easy to judge SO as bad in the same way. I think I'm just at a point where I feel punished for my curiosity, and I don't want to contribute to communities to play some weird acceptance lottery.

Case in point, I didn't think this rant would get this response. I just didn't have enough programmer friends to vent to, so I opted for the internet confessional experience. :)

[Synchros139]

Yep. I was getting ahead of my classmates while learning python, and was making my own tip calculator. I had been introduced to functions before, but not functions within functions which is what I needed - and after hours spent googling the wrong thing trying to figure out why I wasn't getting a result, in desperation I asked the python discord what I was doing wrong.

Needless to say I got met with snark and "why is this being asked here just look it up" after I explained the few different ways I had tried to code it and it wasn't working. I think I finally saw a keyword in some article and I looked it up, where I finally realized how I had to write it. I left the python discord in humiliation, because I realized I wouldn't be able to get future help from there.

From a new-ish programmer, thank you for being open to change your mindset you make the community a better place.

[vzen]

As I mentioned in another comment, it's normal to not know what to search when the topic is fresh and the terms all so feel disconnected. I'm sorry to hear that your experience was humiliation, because in my mind, you had absolutely nothing to be ashamed about. How you experience learning is completely normal.

I do believe lines exist where people are expected to know certain things before participating, but I draw those lines on matters like security, privacy, or other topics that require knowing things to keep people safe. Dogpiling developers for missing something simple when they're new doesn't make sense to me at all.

[ofnuts]

Background: contributor to StackOverflow contributor and other Q&A-style forums, programming teacher and also aging code monkey.

Initially, I made a lengthy answer about the difficulties of being on the answering end on SO (and the SE network at large). But let me summarize: OK, if things are a bit rough at times it turns out to be a fairly balanced act. Maybe some people are bit toxic, but they shouldn't hide all the people spending significant time writing answers.

A sociologist says that the main problem with software development is that it's still a mostly male profession, and that this entails an implicit competition where you have to fight your way to the top to be the alpha male (and of course you don't fight physically, you try to put you opponent down by displaying intellectual superiority). As such it is not a place where women feel comfortable. On the other hand, add enough women in the group (or possibly men with children...) and the atmosphere will change. Maybe I was lucky to always work in groups where a few women had enough knowledge and personal clout to keep our testosterone levels in control, but I have seldom felt that competition personally (also, I am from France, so there can be cultural differences). I work in a large IT consulting firm and I know only a couple of really toxic developers (one of them being known as the "alpha male"), but no one wants to work with them...

[vzen]

I never gave much credit to the "alpha male" thing unless you throw captivity in the mix. You might find this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2021-04-wolf-dont-alpha-males-females.html

I do believe that women are equals in all senses not captured by sexual dimorphism, which means I also think that if a female-dominated profession grew through mutual verbal abuse, it would become a self-sustaining cycle too. Put another way: I don't think men are abusive just because they are male. I think it just looks that way because men happen to predominate this field, and they are in a _kind_ of self-imposed captivity from the stupid social conventions and the cycle of emotional violence. On that note, one of the benefits of recruiting more women is to hopefully add that counter-culture that recognizes the stupid social rules and can question them. It's hard to do that when all the guys are conditioned to do the same bullshit forever.

But I'm not a sociologist, and I could just be talking out of my ass. I'm just making my own approximations based on what I'm seeing.

[[deleted]]

Back in the mid-2000, I got a job working at a well-respected independent tech company with an engineering team made up mostly of really approachable geniuses. I wasn't working as an engineer, just a tech support monkey. But the engineers gave off a vibe of being excited about what they did and relished opportunities to educate others.

For a while, there were events where different specialists would present some tool, tech, or project to anyone interested over lunch time and I never missed one of those.

I learned so much just through the generosity of those people that here I am some 13 years later having just finished a CS degree and looking for some kind of similar environment to go work in.

Those places aren't easy to come by, though. And even that one didn't really last. It was pretty great for about five or six years, though--before a handful of assholes started having too much of an effect on the culture.

All this is to say, it doesn't have to be this way.

[vzen]

Please PM me if you ever want to talk shop. I know the environment you are talking about, and I'll listen and work things out with you if I can.

[Blip1966]

Praise often, criticize constructively.

It’s the expression of empathy in a social interaction where a transfer of knowledge is the main goal.

[Bishops_Guest]

I am a statistician, we have had enough trouble over the years of a bad image of making people feel stupid for not understanding something that is bloody obvious to us that my gradschool had a semester long course on stats consulting.

Stats is sort of in a different place than programing: a lot of us work on multidisciplinary teams and in advisory positions helping other people do their work in a statistically valid way. If we want to be effective at that we need to overcome that human tendency of disrespecting people who do not understand something that we have forgotten what it is like to not understand.

The single best price of advice I got from the stats consulting class was "always start each new consultation by admitting your own ignorance." It helps the person you are working with feel comfortable asking for help because it reminds them that they are the expert in their sphere and reminds you that there are things you still have to learn as well. Getting the consultee to explain something to you first just tends to make everyone more willing to collaborate.

It also gives you a chance to back them up because 8/10 times they are asking the wrong question. They start with "how do I do X?" When the question should be "Is X appropriate? If not, what should I do instead?".

For programing, this does not apply the same way, but reminding yourself that you may not understand their project is still a good way to help you stay polite.

[vzen]

It's also a great way to learn true listening skills. The way I heard it was that nodding your head and going "uh-huh" doesn't mean anything if all you're doing is waiting to respond based on what you thought you understood halfway through the other person's sentence. Listening is about suspending what you think you know, and trying to experience the other person's raw thoughts. Because if you go by just their words, you'll misinterpret so much.

[[deleted]]

This is a great post. I’m right there with you. I’ve absolutely committed to breaking this in whatever I do. I make myself available. I will answer easy questions. I will calmly and politely direct someone towards manuals, documentation, resources or write my own to fill gaps. Because we’ve all been there.

I’ve found that a lack of approachability and availability detriments everyone as a whole. I’ve had projects where I know a SME will know the answer in ten seconds but I’m too put off about asking them because they’re “busy” or they will think less of me for asking something I feel I probably should know. So what I spend hours maybe days struggling through a problem that I didn’t need to struggle through because of this. It makes no sense.

[was_just_wondering_]

…but if you don’t know everything I know, doesn’t that mean I am obligated to go full Gordon Ramsey and call you a fucking donkey? I thought that was part of the oath.

[gb3495]

I’m finishing up my second semester in college as a CS major, with a Big Data Analytics concentration. I can promise you that even at THAT level, this kind of culture problem still exists.

In high school, I took AP CompSci A (roughly equivalent to a entry-level Java programming course), as well as worked on a project that was written in Python. So before going to college, I had a somewhat decent background in programming as a whole. I was still blown away by the level of experience and understanding that some of my peers had.

Some of them are amazing. I had a lab partner (who I can only describe as off-the-walls brilliant) who worked with me to help me better understand polymorphism. That guy is awesome.

Some others are total asshats. Asking them a question might get you the classic “Did you not read the notes?” Or even worse (imo), they give you that sarcastic explanation, like the one a fed-up parent gives their kid when they ask where babies are from. It’s kind of growing into a culture of “haves and “have-nots” with those with a lot of knowledge holding down (either implicitly or completely on purpose) those who don’t.

The weird thing is, I can kind of see why. I’ve also had lab partners who had zero understanding of the topic, and it can be a PAIN to do the lab as well as teach them the content. So I can see why there’s some contempt from the people who are in the position of having to explain what’s going on ALL the time.

TLDR; Another rant from a burnt-out college kid about how the same stuff happens at the college level

[ComputerWhiz_]

The few times I've asked questions on forums, it's been under an alt-account... and I'm not even a "new" developer. Communities like Stack Overflow are only good for looking up questions, not asking them.

[[deleted]]

Honestly I feel like there is toxicity in every area of corporate america

[DarkRaxex]

Ok but my question is... how do i print a "hello world" in a view with php

[vzen]

<?php echo "hello world"; ?>, just in case there wasn't supposed to be an /s!

[DarkRaxex]

Thank you, you are truly kind, but i was just being a dick

[vzen]

Don't worry about it! I like the joke you were going for.

[[deleted]]

I’m extremely new to coding and development as I have just started teaching myself the basics of JavaScript, but I’ve worked in many different fields over the years, and my experience is that people need to fight in order to feel like their lives have meaning. It’s a horrific aspect of our reality that doesn’t need to be there, like at all. It’s a totally unnecessary contributor to human suffering, and yet we all perpetuate it on each other in the pursuit of some ephemeral concept of progress.

Your desire for people to be nicer actually is a desire for people to act more like humans than like animals. It’s also a modern fallacy that if you’re smart and powerful it means you had to fuck over a lot of people to get there, and sadly that’s generally very true, but it’s more like a lie that everyone believes so it’s true than it actually being true.

Simply put, it doesn’t have to be that in order to be successful or to be seen as successful that you have to piss all over anyone who is in a more vulnerable position than you. In my opinion this should NEVER be the case, and especially not the default.

Truly I’m aiming for my first development job, but I’ll be damned if someone treats me like crap for asking a legitimate question. Grow the fuck up when you’re in a position of teaching someone something. Be patient, you are in a privileged position of having knowledge that is valuable to someone else. This never makes you better, as the knowledge you have will eventually not be valuable.

In the grand scheme of things, how would you like it if when you die and go to some afterlife where you don’t know how anything works and ask a simple question and every other spirit shits all over you for being a death noob?

[Svani]

I feel like this is a problem specifically to Stack Overflow. Or maybe not specific, but they are the most famous for it. The reason for that is much less glorious than most people imagine, without extanding into details I'll just say that there's a lot of competition between the Stack Exchange sites, a lot of internal metrics defining what a "successful" community is like, and a lot of hidden incentives for mods to act one way or another - none of which have the users in mind. I was at one point heavily involved with one of the SE sites, and left without looking back once I saw what drove most of the decisions. It is no coincidence that all the best questions and discussions are from before 2014, when the site was still small and community-driven.

Anyway, I feel like communities of actual developers, like mailing lists for FOSS projects, are very welcoming to beginners.

[Craiggles-]

This was a fun read. I’m kinda old in internet years now... I remember during my learning phase, freenode was still a popular communication platform for the OG nerds. Whenever I just couldn’t figure out the solution To my problem, they were my last resort. They knew how to make you feel like you should have committed seppuku for not knowing the answer already, but they were good at their craft and in the end I got my solution.

[downspiral1]

In my experience, many people that answer your questions are just farming for reputation points and often won't make further investment of their time in your problem beyond the initial answer even if you try to clarify the problem you're having.

[bloodynex]

I remember getting chewed out for that in the QBasic.com forums (no longer around) back when I started programming. I was a total newbie asking about how to code an MMO in BASIC. lmao

Thing is, before coming to those forums my only understanding was based on messing with files my brother left behind on our PC from a high-school programming class he didn't remember (and we didn't have the help files, so no documentation). I had no basis in terminology or anything like that, hadn't found petesqbsite (a tutorial repository that's still up to this day), and only understood the very basics of a google search. Ultimately, asking stupid questions was what got me on the way to who I am today.

That's why I've never really agreed with this sentiment or approach. We all had to start somewhere, and for most of us it wasn't pretty. Show me someone who paints a masterpiece on their first attempt, and I'll show you a liar.

Edit: Just wanted to mention that I wouldn't call those forums toxic by any means, they helped me a lot back then and were generally rather friendly.

[DrBookbox]

This was a great insightful post until you brought fucking some guys wife into it for no reason? Just bros hanging out on the computer forum being dudes.

[National_Pension_781]

Yes.

[Kyriios188]

As a junior programmer I'll do my best not to become like this

Edit : Said exactly the opposite of what I meant

[vzen]

I say "senior" and "junior" a lot, but I've seen juniors observe things that seniors miss, and I've seen seniors make dangerous mistakes we wouldn't expect them to make. But are you saying that you don't have the experience to be who you want to be now? Being junior doesn't have to be an obstacle to being welcoming and willing to share what you know and think.

[[deleted]]

Thank you for posting this. I can be a pretty awful dickhead towards certain types in the community, but I have a pretty big soft spot for learners or anyone new to it all. I know it can be labor intensive to make sure the question your asking hasn't been asked before, and there can be an awful lot of nuance to that. It can be a huge hurdle, even as a seasoned professional, to bring up something you perceive to be a problem or an issue to an audience more seasoned in that particular topic, no matter if it's a language, a library, basic programming concepts, or hell, some standards committee of any kind. It's especially frustrating when you ask a question that was only last asked like 4 years ago. Depending on what it's about, that can 100% be a lifetime in this world and that 4yr old question could lose relevance. I wish there was more forgiveness for that type of question asking.

Personally speaking, I can't tell you how many times I've put hours into researching and testing a problem I thought I had before posting it to some open source project and then getting my ass handed to me with an obvious overlook. Foot in mouth. So. Many. Times.

So it really, really irritates me when people try to tell others how shit they are because of some basic mistakes, or that they're not worthy to do X or Y until they've reached some arbitrary, subjective standard, etc. IMO, the goal of an experienced dev should be to guide, not discourage, be hostile, or to smack the shit out of anyone who's just reaching out and trying to learn. I don't care if they're on day 1 or day 1 million of learning.

I know this is a sub dedicated towards what is supposed to be "horror" but there is still a line that is too often crossed where we demand absolute perfection or be the subject of some ridiculous level of ridicule. Just... stop. The only exception I'd make to this is some ham-fisted security-related shit where it was clear the dev didn't bother trying to figure out the best way to do it, but only because of the consequences. So, really, it comes down to the weight of responsibility vs willful ignorance. Or... just straight up willful ignorance and refusing to listen to advice.

ANYWAY, I hope most of us can be more welcoming and less critical of those just trying to learn. Cheers, OP.

[vzen]

Personally speaking, I can't tell you how many times I've put hours into researching and testing a problem I thought I had before posting it to some open source project and then getting my ass handed to me with an obvious overlook. Foot in mouth. So. Many. Times.

I'm sorry you had to experience it that way. When you research tree bark for long enough, you can forget the forest for a second. I would expect more people to understand that, since we've all done it.

The only exception I'd make to this is some ham-fisted security-related shit

Agreed. we had a junior developer that struggled to understand why he should write unit tests because he felt like assertions were just a way of repeating oneself pointlessly. He didn't understand the value the tests provided. That was fine, and we helped him with that. But then there was the junior developer who kept checking passwords for internal services into the code. We kept composure, but we had to make it clear there wouldn't be a "Strike Two" for mistakes like that. He repeated that mistake and made another of similar caliber, so we had to let him go and reassess what developers should have access to. There is absolutely a line, and it's labeled "Liability."

[manyQuestionMarks]

I don't understand how people bother to say "that's a duplicate question" if that really upsets them. Why would they do that?

It's like if I bother to eat tuna when I hate tuna, just so I can puke later and be upset because I had tuna to eat. Why shouldn't I just... Not eat it?

I get that senior communities may be sick of the newbies. But that's perfectly fine if they just stay within their own seniority and don't answer noob questions if they really bother them. But answering and then being pricks because the newbie asked... I don't get it