Rant: I am just a newbie

Actually, that might be another reason I'm more sympathetic to the apparently lazy noob than most. I'm a bit paranoid I might be slamming someone who'd turn into an excellent dev with a bit of nurturing and driving them off into an embarressed silence. Thinking back, the experience I previously described on the Java forum very nearly did that to me. It was only my heeeuge ego that meant I was able to go onto other forums and post but I never, ever went back to the Sun forums. I'd hate the thought that I'd done that to someone else.

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Originally Posted by FunkyDexter

I think alot of people regard having to ask a question as a sign of weakness and find it embarressing.

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In my team other than three are that way. It use to be two of them asked me question until they got tired of me telling them to hit MSDN as we have a full site license for everything, use Social forums or Google. The other one is strictly Google and one percent of the time MSDN support. When he hits MSDN it is always a stomper for Microsoft.

Looks like a good place for a Samuel L. Jackson quote from Pulp Fiction about now.

Or is it that the team members don't want to even search for the answers online? They already have YOU as their leader to supply them with the answers!

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Originally Posted by honeybee

Or is it that the team members don't want to even search for the answers online? They already have YOU as their leader to supply them with the answers!

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All I can do is give them a pathway. In the end all I really care about is they don't spend too much time banging at their keyboard going in circle. I tend to walk the floor which sometimes gets them asking when normally they don't or simply ask what are they doing and how is it going? Part of my salary is devoted to this along with a time code for my electronic timesheet for training and assisting team members.

I have been seeing posts lately where members are chastising the OPs for not looking at Google for their answers with snide remarks like "you could have easily found this on Google". While that is usually true and I tend to go there first myself I hate to see that happening. I was a member of a mainframe forum as the mainframe was dying off and a common answer from people, like the Google search responses, was "that's in the manuals". It got to the point I suggested instead of the site pulling up just have it link directly to the IBM manuals on-line.

Sometimes the interaction with other humans along with the synergy that comes with that is nice. I saw something earlier in this thread that I agree with...if the post irritates you or you have nothing to say but negative things just don't reply. Move on and let it go. Others will probably help out.

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Originally Posted by TysonLPrice

I saw something earlier in this thread that I agree with...if the post irritates you or you have nothing to say but negative things just don't reply. Move on and let it go. Others will probably help out.

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I don't think that it's unreasonable to encourage people to make effort on their own behalf and I don't think that it's unreasonable to push people to make an effort on their own behalf. Those who are genuine will get the message and benefit from it and those who aren't genuine... well, I don't want those people to be encouraged to join my profession. I've had to work with people like that in the past and I don't want to have to again and I don't want any of the genuine people to have to either. I've seen many, many questions posted on this and other forums that would take seconds rather than minutes to answer with a simple web search. If you're really not prepared to make that much of an effort then I don't mind discouraging you from programming. I've had plenty of pleasant interactions with people, both experienced and inexperienced, who were quite prepared to make an effort themselves but needed some help along the way. That's the sort of person that I believe deserves help on forums. I don't look down on inexperience or lack of knowledge but I do look down on lack of effort and I make no apology for that.

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Originally Posted by jmcilhinney

I don't think that it's unreasonable to encourage people to make effort on their own behalf and I don't think that it's unreasonable to push people to make an effort on their own behalf. Those who are genuine will get the message and benefit from it and those who aren't genuine... well, I don't want those people to be encouraged to join my profession. I've had to work with people like that in the past and I don't want to have to again and I don't want any of the genuine people to have to either. I've seen many, many questions posted on this and other forums that would take seconds rather than minutes to answer with a simple web search. If you're really not prepared to make that much of an effort then I don't mind discouraging you from programming. I've had plenty of pleasant interactions with people, both experienced and inexperienced, who were quite prepared to make an effort themselves but needed some help along the way. That's the sort of person that I believe deserves help on forums. I don't look down on inexperience or lack of knowledge but I do look down on lack of effort and I make no apology for that.

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I hope you didn't take my last post personally and I certainly didn't mean it that way. I should have attached it to the previous post that got me thinking of that. I've seen discussions like this thread in other forums and I tend to be a bleeding heart when it comes to being tolerant of newbies and "slackers". I do see both sides of the issue.

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Originally Posted by TysonLPrice

I hope you didn't take my last post personally and I certainly didn't mean it that way. I should have attached it to the previous post that got me thinking of that. I've seen discussions like this thread in other forums and I tend to be a bleeding heart when it comes to being tolerant of newbies and "slackers". I do see both sides of the issue.

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Fear not, I haven't taken anything that's been said in this thread by anyone personally, so anyone who meant what they said as a personal attack against me has failed miserably ;) I just felt that what I had to say was put in context by what you, and some others, have said.

Often times I think that I should just ignore some posts. Often times I do. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'll post a comment that someone should have searched the web or MSDN first and sometimes they'll post back and say that they have - sometimes they say for hours - and they haven't been able to find anything. I know that I have more experience and therefore might sometimes have a better idea of what to search for but sometimes the search is just so obvious that I have to wonder how the person could write code if they can't even search the web effectively.

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Originally Posted by jmcilhinney

Sometimes I'll post a comment that someone should have searched the web or MSDN first and sometimes they'll post back and say that they have - sometimes they say for hours - and they haven't been able to find anything. I know that I have more experience and therefore might sometimes have a better idea of what to search for but sometimes the search is just so obvious that I have to wonder how the person could write code if they can't even search the web effectively.

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Yeah, and I think that sometimes that's the rub... sometimes the key is in knowing WHAT to search for as well as HOW ... And yet, there are times when all I do is take the keywords in their own title, feed them into Google, and I get reasonable results in the first 10 links... cases like that I usually approach with the "you know in the amount of time it took for you to write up this post and wait for a response, you could have gotten the answer yourself... I just typed [what ever keywords here] in to google and got this:" and then give them the link to the results...

Sometimes they then realize they were over complicating their searches, other times, they really didn't do the search, and very rarely, but I have had it happen, I get the "I tried those and they still didn't work for my for xyz reason." Usually it's because some vital info was left out of the original post...

-tg