Welcome, Newcomer to Code Project QA : but, first, let us insult you, and down-vote your question
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[^] : the comments Apparently this pattern of insulting and down-voting newcomers, and others, is just not going to stop. It literally makes me sick to see this. I made a "vow" a few years ago to express my satisfaction and appreciation for many years (14+ now) of learning here on CodeProject by taking an active role on QA. Over the last few years, I have observed a very small number of individuals who have exhibited consistent anti-social, and hostile, behavior towards newcomers, and other CP members active in answering QA questions, etc. Another disturbing pattern I have observed is that the "reputation at any cost" behavior or a few very high-rep QA posters has, in my humble opinion, had the effect of "modeling" gaming the rep system for some bright, relatively new, posters. I have observed some of the most respected, and high-ranking, members of CP, like Marc Clifton, and Pete O'Hanlon publicly express that they ceased any regular participation in QA because of the negative behavior encountered there. Other CP members who I know are very technically competent, like Nagy Vilmos, have also publicly stated they withdrew from QA because of negative behavior there. Yes, I have spoken out about what I observe in QA, many times over the years. I have reported comments, or solutions, as abusive when I thought it appropriate ... but, always "reluctantly." My respected technical peers and mentors, I think "we" can do better than this. Yes, it's "sticky:" no one wishes to see the relative (say, compared to StackOverFlow) laissez-faire ambiance of CodeProject turn into a rigid, draconian, "by the book," environment. And, we do get people posting on QA who are obviously ... or soon prove they ... are shirking homework, are, indeed, lazy, or, who are almost hopelessly confused. imho, some of those folks deserve down-voting and removal of posts asap. But, I think no one deserves being belittled, demeaned. As someone who has spent a significant percentage of his adult life living in Asia, I am aware of the possible difficulties for people whose mother-tongue is not English in using this site, and I am aware of the fact that for some Asian cultures what, for a western person, is a casual slight or "teasing," for an Asian person is much more than casual when seen through the lens of "face." I'm near the point (rep level as "Authority") where I have almost reached
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Personally speaking, if I was relaxing on a weekend, and someone posted a homework question, I'd do it for them. With explanations. Who am I to judge how other people pursue their academics? :-)
Regards, Nish
Website: www.voidnish.com Blog: voidnish.wordpress.com
I grew up in my career, with those detailed replies you, Rama used to give me. They were almost like home works ! I'm still grateful to all those teachings!
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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Hi Marc, I apologize if I mis-characteraized your words; I do have a very clear memory of you describing why you had withdrawn from QA from years ago, but, unfortunately, I did not save a link to that statement (on the Lounge). cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
There were so many who had said similar things. Including one of the earliest members and a good friend of mine , "Toxcct"! I dont think anybody remembers him know. He was an Mvp in C++ forum.
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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It's kinda like the elephant in the room, huh :-) No one wants to mention him by name. But really it's just one guy, one single person behind all this unrest! I know you guys don't want to lose a high-value contributor, but you also gotta consider if he's causing more damage than he's doing good here. Also, maybe he's just a nice guy but with a not so socially compatible outer temperament. Perhaps, a few nice words from you (in private) would help here?
Regards, Nish
Website: www.voidnish.com Blog: voidnish.wordpress.com
Nish Nishant wrote:
Also, maybe he's just a nice guy but with a not so socially compatible outer temperament.
If its the elephant Im thinking of, then, I'd offer a suggestion from working with various species of elephants - there's a cultural issue here - Ive observed that the particular herd of elephants interpret things 'quite literally' while they try and understand what it is in front of them - so they fire off a first response... once they have digested (if they can) the issue, obviously if it's too inane it remains undigestible and it cant be helped, they often propose a good answer. I think there is a nice guy/elephant there, maybe sometimes he'd like to be the elephant herd leader (we'll leave out that elephants are a matriarchal society for the purpose of this)
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[^] : the comments Apparently this pattern of insulting and down-voting newcomers, and others, is just not going to stop. It literally makes me sick to see this. I made a "vow" a few years ago to express my satisfaction and appreciation for many years (14+ now) of learning here on CodeProject by taking an active role on QA. Over the last few years, I have observed a very small number of individuals who have exhibited consistent anti-social, and hostile, behavior towards newcomers, and other CP members active in answering QA questions, etc. Another disturbing pattern I have observed is that the "reputation at any cost" behavior or a few very high-rep QA posters has, in my humble opinion, had the effect of "modeling" gaming the rep system for some bright, relatively new, posters. I have observed some of the most respected, and high-ranking, members of CP, like Marc Clifton, and Pete O'Hanlon publicly express that they ceased any regular participation in QA because of the negative behavior encountered there. Other CP members who I know are very technically competent, like Nagy Vilmos, have also publicly stated they withdrew from QA because of negative behavior there. Yes, I have spoken out about what I observe in QA, many times over the years. I have reported comments, or solutions, as abusive when I thought it appropriate ... but, always "reluctantly." My respected technical peers and mentors, I think "we" can do better than this. Yes, it's "sticky:" no one wishes to see the relative (say, compared to StackOverFlow) laissez-faire ambiance of CodeProject turn into a rigid, draconian, "by the book," environment. And, we do get people posting on QA who are obviously ... or soon prove they ... are shirking homework, are, indeed, lazy, or, who are almost hopelessly confused. imho, some of those folks deserve down-voting and removal of posts asap. But, I think no one deserves being belittled, demeaned. As someone who has spent a significant percentage of his adult life living in Asia, I am aware of the possible difficulties for people whose mother-tongue is not English in using this site, and I am aware of the fact that for some Asian cultures what, for a western person, is a casual slight or "teasing," for an Asian person is much more than casual when seen through the lens of "face." I'm near the point (rep level as "Authority") where I have almost reached
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den2k88 wrote:
Each and every time instead of an answer there are people criticizing what you did or telling that what you're trying to achieve is wrong - even when given the circumstances is actually reasonable, at least more than rewriting the entire code base of the company.
That really irritates me. If they can't help you with the problem as the situation is, they should just let somebody else answer. As you say, you may very well HAVE to do stuff a certain way because of how the system is build before you got at it. Refactoring is not always a good idea because is can waste company and/or client money and/or time. I have asked specific questions on occasion, and people will come up with a lot of complicated ways of solving them that are not realistic. But when I point out that that is not what I ask for, I'll almost certainly be abused... :doh:
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the timeYes, I can definitely relate to that one. For many of us, the stuff we struggle with most is garbage that we've inherited from our predecessors. We know full well that the "big picture" answer is something along the lines of "use pattern X", "use pattern Y" or "normalise your goddamn database" but we're not about to get the go-ahead to rewrite something that's due to die in a couple of years and we really, really don't need to be reminded about how unspeakably awful the code is. I hate having to precede questions with an explanation that borders on an apology - "I'm working on some legacy code that was written by someone who couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag and I'd really love to be able to fix one little thing without rewriting 2 million lines of very bad code etc., etc." Even having done that, there will still be some numpty who skips straight to the code sample and blurts out "Why aren't you using MVVM, idiot?" Whilst CP is nowhere near as bad as SO for that sort of self-righteous prickery, I do think that it's becoming more prevalent as time goes by.
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[^] : the comments Apparently this pattern of insulting and down-voting newcomers, and others, is just not going to stop. It literally makes me sick to see this. I made a "vow" a few years ago to express my satisfaction and appreciation for many years (14+ now) of learning here on CodeProject by taking an active role on QA. Over the last few years, I have observed a very small number of individuals who have exhibited consistent anti-social, and hostile, behavior towards newcomers, and other CP members active in answering QA questions, etc. Another disturbing pattern I have observed is that the "reputation at any cost" behavior or a few very high-rep QA posters has, in my humble opinion, had the effect of "modeling" gaming the rep system for some bright, relatively new, posters. I have observed some of the most respected, and high-ranking, members of CP, like Marc Clifton, and Pete O'Hanlon publicly express that they ceased any regular participation in QA because of the negative behavior encountered there. Other CP members who I know are very technically competent, like Nagy Vilmos, have also publicly stated they withdrew from QA because of negative behavior there. Yes, I have spoken out about what I observe in QA, many times over the years. I have reported comments, or solutions, as abusive when I thought it appropriate ... but, always "reluctantly." My respected technical peers and mentors, I think "we" can do better than this. Yes, it's "sticky:" no one wishes to see the relative (say, compared to StackOverFlow) laissez-faire ambiance of CodeProject turn into a rigid, draconian, "by the book," environment. And, we do get people posting on QA who are obviously ... or soon prove they ... are shirking homework, are, indeed, lazy, or, who are almost hopelessly confused. imho, some of those folks deserve down-voting and removal of posts asap. But, I think no one deserves being belittled, demeaned. As someone who has spent a significant percentage of his adult life living in Asia, I am aware of the possible difficulties for people whose mother-tongue is not English in using this site, and I am aware of the fact that for some Asian cultures what, for a western person, is a casual slight or "teasing," for an Asian person is much more than casual when seen through the lens of "face." I'm near the point (rep level as "Authority") where I have almost reached
I just don't get it. As a community, why do we even accept this behavior from our members? I'm not talking about the member asking the basic programming question, but the ones wasting their time commenting (off topic!) about it? If a question is something you don't want to answer, then, well, don't answer it. It is obvious to me that the reason we're getting members insulting and down-voting basic programming questions, is that they don't think we, as a community, should be bothering with answering such questions. I agree that we shouldn't be answering such questions as if they were posed by colleagues, but instead, that we should be answering those questions as if we were mentoring new initiates. This suggests that we need to have a separate forum for such questions where expectations are set appropriately for both sides.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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[^] : the comments Apparently this pattern of insulting and down-voting newcomers, and others, is just not going to stop. It literally makes me sick to see this. I made a "vow" a few years ago to express my satisfaction and appreciation for many years (14+ now) of learning here on CodeProject by taking an active role on QA. Over the last few years, I have observed a very small number of individuals who have exhibited consistent anti-social, and hostile, behavior towards newcomers, and other CP members active in answering QA questions, etc. Another disturbing pattern I have observed is that the "reputation at any cost" behavior or a few very high-rep QA posters has, in my humble opinion, had the effect of "modeling" gaming the rep system for some bright, relatively new, posters. I have observed some of the most respected, and high-ranking, members of CP, like Marc Clifton, and Pete O'Hanlon publicly express that they ceased any regular participation in QA because of the negative behavior encountered there. Other CP members who I know are very technically competent, like Nagy Vilmos, have also publicly stated they withdrew from QA because of negative behavior there. Yes, I have spoken out about what I observe in QA, many times over the years. I have reported comments, or solutions, as abusive when I thought it appropriate ... but, always "reluctantly." My respected technical peers and mentors, I think "we" can do better than this. Yes, it's "sticky:" no one wishes to see the relative (say, compared to StackOverFlow) laissez-faire ambiance of CodeProject turn into a rigid, draconian, "by the book," environment. And, we do get people posting on QA who are obviously ... or soon prove they ... are shirking homework, are, indeed, lazy, or, who are almost hopelessly confused. imho, some of those folks deserve down-voting and removal of posts asap. But, I think no one deserves being belittled, demeaned. As someone who has spent a significant percentage of his adult life living in Asia, I am aware of the possible difficulties for people whose mother-tongue is not English in using this site, and I am aware of the fact that for some Asian cultures what, for a western person, is a casual slight or "teasing," for an Asian person is much more than casual when seen through the lens of "face." I'm near the point (rep level as "Authority") where I have almost reached
Sergey! It's been Sergey! Not me!! Sergey is the one impugning and scorning CP's simpletons. Let's pray for Sergey to get better. Prayer will change Sergey. We can heal Sergey. Let's pray. Let's make Sergey better together. We can do it! I feel so redeemed now. :-D
Remain Calm & Continue To Google
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BillWoodruff wrote:
ad hominem assault on people it does bother me.
I agree. I've actually chatted with you know who in QA and it is my opinion that he does have good intentions but I think the language barrier and cultural issues get in the way. But before I chatted with him I also felt he was quite rude so it is very understandable that most people feel that way.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
If you're talking about who I think you are, then I have similar experience: if you try and answer in a polite, factual way, you get polite, factual, and very insightful answers. My impression is that he really wants to help, not go out to insult people. However, his experience and qualification as a programmer clearly exceeds his ability to lower his level of thinking to that of newcomers, especially those from a different culture. That said, I agree with him that most questions need to be more concise, and newcomers need to be told just that. Putting together the individual hints to the actual problem from a rather random selection of thoughts put down in a bad imitation of english can be a very hard and time-consuming task. When I do take the time to try and help someone, I often feel more like a detective than a programmer! And the detective-part is taking way too much time for my liking...
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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I just don't get it. As a community, why do we even accept this behavior from our members? I'm not talking about the member asking the basic programming question, but the ones wasting their time commenting (off topic!) about it? If a question is something you don't want to answer, then, well, don't answer it. It is obvious to me that the reason we're getting members insulting and down-voting basic programming questions, is that they don't think we, as a community, should be bothering with answering such questions. I agree that we shouldn't be answering such questions as if they were posed by colleagues, but instead, that we should be answering those questions as if we were mentoring new initiates. This suggests that we need to have a separate forum for such questions where expectations are set appropriately for both sides.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
patbob wrote:
I agree that we shouldn't be answering such questions as if they were posed by colleagues, but instead, that we should be answering those questions as if we were mentoring new initiates. This suggests that we need to have a separate forum for such questions where expectations are set appropriately for both sides.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Have a separate forum for beginners with a set code-of-conduct to encourage them, not belittle them. It's hard enough to be a beginner trying to learn then to also have to deal with disrespect.
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone - Bjarne Stroustrup The world is going to laugh at you anyway, might as well crack the 1st joke! My code has no bugs, it runs exactly as it was written.