The questions we get these days!
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arthurfsouza wrote:
I worked with "experienced" developers which had to ask me, an "I have been programming as a job for 6 months" student how to retrieve items to a .net list.
I get the point you are trying to make, but just because a person is experienced, that does not automatically mean they are experienced in the same disciplines as you.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
I find the existence of experienced .net developers that don't know how to retrieve an item from a generic List much more disturbing than that of students that just throw questions on the internet expecting answers from the beyond. Or perhaps one evolves (using that word loosely) into another.
- Arthur Souza www.lotusrpg.com.br
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Touchè I was just thinking last night that I miss the days of UseNet. One learned fairly quickly from some really brutal responses what was and was not acceptable. Moreover, flame-wars and grilling the truly inept were seen as sport. But now, since we all have to play nicely the standard has stooped to that of the lowliest competitor - bring back the days of measure-up or be chewed-up and spat-out! The sum total of the documentation/help I had available when starting out were: The help file for Turbo Pascal 6.0, the help file for Borland c++ 3.1 and (the one I spent most time with) the commented output of Sourer, a dissasembler whose serial number I still recall now some 19 years after first getting it B309868-YTHT
Agree fully with this - it's kinda what I came here to say. WE have caused this problem by allowing it to continue, and even some people (Stack Overflow) are making money off this problem. On Stack Overflow, you can't say "dumb question, moron, RTFM" as it's against the community guidelines for what's acceptable. So, they've made it a rule that you have to be an idiot to ask a question on the site. The problem comes when you have a real question that you really need the help of the community. I have several unanswered questions on Stack Overflow because of that. It's not a site where you can ask the hard questions, and if you do, you're ignored because it's not easy to "get points" by providing a thoughtful answer, it requires work, and when you can get points on the site by doing Google searches on behalf of other users, there isn't much motivation for people to want to improve themselves by exploring the difficult stuff. We need to be able to say "FGI" to people and CLOSE the question when it's stupid. AND, we, as a community, should let the idiots flounder. When someone asks a dumb question and you help them, you are perpetuating the problem. If we can't flame them, we could at least IGNORE them. Please.
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Agree fully with this - it's kinda what I came here to say. WE have caused this problem by allowing it to continue, and even some people (Stack Overflow) are making money off this problem. On Stack Overflow, you can't say "dumb question, moron, RTFM" as it's against the community guidelines for what's acceptable. So, they've made it a rule that you have to be an idiot to ask a question on the site. The problem comes when you have a real question that you really need the help of the community. I have several unanswered questions on Stack Overflow because of that. It's not a site where you can ask the hard questions, and if you do, you're ignored because it's not easy to "get points" by providing a thoughtful answer, it requires work, and when you can get points on the site by doing Google searches on behalf of other users, there isn't much motivation for people to want to improve themselves by exploring the difficult stuff. We need to be able to say "FGI" to people and CLOSE the question when it's stupid. AND, we, as a community, should let the idiots flounder. When someone asks a dumb question and you help them, you are perpetuating the problem. If we can't flame them, we could at least IGNORE them. Please.
In Quick Answers you have the ability to close questions where the poster has made no attempt to allow others to help them. This feature will be added to the discussion forums.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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Well, you're right in that it's too easy to just shoot a question into the great Internet Void (tm) and sit back and wait for an answer. One of the things that kill me is the number of questions that claim to be "urgent" yet they're willing to wait for who known how many hours for somebody to notice their question on CP or anywhere else. If it's "urgent" you should be researching it yourself. Personally, I blame the instructors (since apparently many of these questioners are in classes somewhere). Linked Lists, Reading / Writing Files, this is all Computer Science 1 stuff yet there are no apparent "cookbook answers" or "class tutorials" on this stuff that explains it more fully. You'd think that problems with this stuff would be a predictable outcome so instructors should prepare to instruct on the topic. And maybe it's the proliferation of "online universities" where there is no physical contact with a "teaching staff" who can provide personalized instruction / answers. Back in the 60's, we had professors who lectured and Teaching Assistants who held other classes and a group of top students (Program Advisors) that sat at desks in the Comp Sci Department and helped fellow students through the homework assignments. I did that job for a couple of semesters. Who provides that service now? Code Project and other such sites.
I went back for new training in '04. The instructors were leaving most in the dust, while for me, they were clearly describing something I'd already read in the text books handed out before classes started. It was semi-helpful review for me because I'd cracked open the books and read them as much as I could before class started. I've attended lectures where that person left me in the dust, because I didn't know there was research I could have done ahead of time. In both cases, they weren't of much help to me because I'm more of a visual learner.
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Erudite_Eric wrote:
in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model?
16 bit code? Oh, we used to dream of having 16 bits! And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you. :-D
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves. It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself. I mean, linked lists, writing data to a file? Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
============================== Nothing to say.
I remember reading through the multi-hundred page MS-DOS 3.3 manual, remembering the commands. I remember reading through the text files on my "teach yourself C" CD with it's Symantec C compiler, and from that made DOS based graphics interface EXE files. I remember learning HTML basics by reading the RFC after downloading them from work ( oh joy, a 2 megabit connection at work in 1998 along with 40 PPM printers :D ). All the basics of opening, reading and writing to files, were as valid in C in 1995 as they are today in PHP, but I am continually surprised by the level of some developers I work with. I'm in a PHP house at the moment. They all want to make their own "frameworks", but when it comes to raw language, how to read and write to a file, error handling, bounds checking, loop control (come on now!), the young'uns today seem to have lost the basics. Ok you can build a castle on sand, but don't expect it to last the centures before it falls over. Come on guys. If you are really lost, go bug your local library and borrow somthing written by Donald Knuth along with a language reference. If you cannot solve the problem with that, *then* come here and yell for help! I don't mind people using the internet to look things up, it's the best reference manual there is today, especially as Einstein is supposed to have said somthing like "the most important is not to know, but to know where to look", but you really have to push this one just a tad further. "Seek and ye shall find", but "understand and ye shall know". This one people tend to forget. I'll help people who help themselves :) In the end though, I really get the feeling that I am the last of my species: The self taught geek who relys on his own brain. Oh well. I'll still try to make the most of it while it lasts !!! Cheers, Daniel
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xperroni wrote:
With the middle ground all but covered, questions will virtually always come up from the extremes:
1. Very difficult and/or novel questions from very smart people, who did look for references but couldn't find any;
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.That however is a matter of perception. I suspect there are a number of mathematicians that would find any number of problems "trivial", yet which even the most enthusiastic beginning hobbyist would find very difficult. As an example in programming I now find it trivially easy to understand recursion and even to unroll a recursive methods. But I also remember that when I was first introduced to recursion it took me 18 months to finally understand it. Further your simplistic scenario ignored the simple statistical fact...people that post here, by definition, must be those that even if they did do research did not find or did not understand the answers they did find. Thus there could be tens or hundreds times the number of people who are successfully learning by themselves.
jschell wrote:
xperroni wrote:
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.
That however is a matter of perception.
Then let's define a "trivial problem" as "so thoroughly documented, anyone able to articulate the question is also able to find an answer they can understand". I believe this to be fairly close to the spirit of the original complaint. My point also remains the same: smart people will look answers up and we won't hear from them, dumb people will pester the forums instead.
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So, please, stop using that GPS device and buy the relevant (paper) maps. ;P
Veni, vidi, vici.
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No, you didn't get it. Using GPS is fine. You go about your way without bothering anyone. Stopping at every street corner to ask for directions, annoying pedestrians and blocking the way for other drivers, that's lame.
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Using the latest help technology provides is sensible. That's my point.
Veni, vidi, vici.
Yes, that's what we've been saying all along. Only that in this case, "the latest help technology provides" is web searching. The problem we have is precisely the people that won't use "the latest help technology provides", and will instead hit the forums with the same basic questions, over and over.
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jschell wrote:
xperroni wrote:
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.
That however is a matter of perception.
Then let's define a "trivial problem" as "so thoroughly documented, anyone able to articulate the question is also able to find an answer they can understand". I believe this to be fairly close to the spirit of the original complaint. My point also remains the same: smart people will look answers up and we won't hear from them, dumb people will pester the forums instead.
xperroni wrote:
smart people will look answers up and we won't hear from them, dumb people will pester the forums instead.
Simplistic and wrong. The fact that an individual does not understand something doesn't make them stupid. The fact that someone isn't as smart as everyone else doesn't automatically preclude them from programming either.
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xperroni wrote:
smart people will look answers up and we won't hear from them, dumb people will pester the forums instead.
Simplistic and wrong. The fact that an individual does not understand something doesn't make them stupid. The fact that someone isn't as smart as everyone else doesn't automatically preclude them from programming either.
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Well, you're right in that it's too easy to just shoot a question into the great Internet Void (tm) and sit back and wait for an answer. One of the things that kill me is the number of questions that claim to be "urgent" yet they're willing to wait for who known how many hours for somebody to notice their question on CP or anywhere else. If it's "urgent" you should be researching it yourself. Personally, I blame the instructors (since apparently many of these questioners are in classes somewhere). Linked Lists, Reading / Writing Files, this is all Computer Science 1 stuff yet there are no apparent "cookbook answers" or "class tutorials" on this stuff that explains it more fully. You'd think that problems with this stuff would be a predictable outcome so instructors should prepare to instruct on the topic. And maybe it's the proliferation of "online universities" where there is no physical contact with a "teaching staff" who can provide personalized instruction / answers. Back in the 60's, we had professors who lectured and Teaching Assistants who held other classes and a group of top students (Program Advisors) that sat at desks in the Comp Sci Department and helped fellow students through the homework assignments. I did that job for a couple of semesters. Who provides that service now? Code Project and other such sites.
That seems a bit unfair - I remember sitting in classes where the instructor explained the material, we had text books, but still some folks would ask for someone to explain what had been explained to them. There will always be idiots who think that programming is a good job, and they should be able to do it well, and that if they can't, it is someone elses fault.
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Erudite_Eric wrote:
Actually what they use is a vast library of books and material to check symptoms causes and cures.
Well, not really! I have done and still do a lot of programming, but my 'day job' was (I am retired) as an Anesthesiologist and Intensivist, and I was generally reckoned a pretty good one. In my speciality, you may have time to research problems you anticipate, but you frequently don't have time to research the unexpected ones, which are often more challenging. The skill comes in being able to anticipate more than 'the average bear' and particularly in rapidly extracting from your prior experiences and/or previous reading/learning the material that is most relevant to the current problem. In less acute specialities, there is more time to think, but putting the gestalt of the patient's presentation (not just signs and symptoms, but also past history and personal circumstances) together into a picture that leads to diagnosis and treatment involves much more than "checking symptoms causes and cures" in "a vast library". Medicine is still at least 40% Art.
This is same "problem" that computation has, CS courses teach you something, but you have to develop your art alone, by coding a great massive number of hours. Like a pilot or a doctor who have seen much in his life. Computation is not enginnering, its 50% enginering and 50% art.
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Yeah, and you could get a really big one for a nickel, too. But perhaps I should stay on point.
About eight years ago, it was my duty to assist a young graduate student, who had an "intern" position with my employer, in getting to work and back each day. One day while we were in transit, this intern, whom we shall call Miss Smith, stunned me by saying with no trace of embarrassment that she never could understand the difference between disk storage and RAM, or why it was important.
Yes, you read that right. I'll wait while you unswallow your tongues.
Mind you, Miss Smith was quite intelligent, on the verge of receiving a Master's degree in Computer Science. She was near to completing a major, much needed transformation of our employer's extensive documentation database. But her education in Computer Science had exposed her only to interpretive tools such as Visual Basic, Access, and Excel. She had never had to run a compiler or linkage editor. She had never had to debug a program interactively. She didn't know what "assembly language" is. In short, she had never had to grapple with the physical reality underneath the virtual world maintained by her interpretive tools.
Yet Miss Smith's skills with those tools were considerable and quite valuable. I have no doubt that she received her Master's degree, and went on to become someone's well-paid employee, on the strength of what she knew.
At the time of the conversation mentioned above, I went into a great, gesture-filled, loathsomely detailed presentation on the differences between RAM and offline storage, why each was necessary and neither was sufficient, and what the divergence between the two could mean according to circumstances. It took the whole of an hour's ride, and I wasn't nearly finished when Miss Smith wished me a good evening, stepped gracefully out of my car, and fled screaming in terror for her dorm room. To this day, I can't be sure that she grasped any fraction of what I said...or, in all candor, whether it would have mattered if she hadn't.
It was possible for Miss Smith to get by without the knowledge under discussion because the tools with which she worked made it unnecessary. Whether it will ever become necessary is questionable; indeed, it becomes less and less likely as time passes and developers' tools increase further in power.
Now, what was that about linked lists?
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
I started basically with these tools that her used. But i walked down because of curiosity. I wanted more and always knowed that these tools hiddened things from me, and wanted to know what they are. In reality, i wanted to make my own visual basic. Six years latter i am finishing my graduation. Now i can make my own compiler if i need, i use garbage collectors, but i understand the problems that can arise, like cache invalidation and memory fragmentation. The conclusion is that these tools are valuable and produce healthy to enterprises and people, even by hiding the internals, or because of it. I dont know how my cars works, but this is not a problem if someone else has the knowledge. There will always be these that like the innerworkings of the things and will go futher down. They can be scarse and the projection is to only increase, but they will exist. Good for who have the knowledge.
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Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves. It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself. I mean, linked lists, writing data to a file? Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
============================== Nothing to say.
Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course... Therein lies the issue. When I was in college for my later major, there were people minoring, or auditing programming courses. So they have no real vested interest in programming as a career. My :java: course featured a beautiful girl who sat next to me, and needed help. That was a fun class. She got help and I got... well, the experience of giving her help, and nothing else. Still! :cool: It beat the sausage fest' of my physics courses.
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Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course... Therein lies the issue. When I was in college for my later major, there were people minoring, or auditing programming courses. So they have no real vested interest in programming as a career. My :java: course featured a beautiful girl who sat next to me, and needed help. That was a fun class. She got help and I got... well, the experience of giving her help, and nothing else. Still! :cool: It beat the sausage fest' of my physics courses.
My class also featured a pretty girl. Nearly 45 years later, she's still sitting next to me. Mega-:cool:
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My class also featured a pretty girl. Nearly 45 years later, she's still sitting next to me. Mega-:cool:
That is awesome! Congrats! :thumbsup:
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Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves. It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself. I mean, linked lists, writing data to a file? Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
============================== Nothing to say.
I taught a Digital Logic and Microprocessors class at a local technical college for two semesters back in the mid-eighties. I usually answered a question with a series of questions that I knew the student should know the answer to. In this way I would steer their answers so they would eventually wind up answering their question themselves. I was fired after two semesters because I wasn't being "helpful" and answering the student's questions. Does that help explain the issue?
