[serious] What you think are the ways to help people?

[Maven]

A half-continuation from this topic: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=317691


That situatation just arised this thing to my mind and for some reason I even wanted to start a new topic about this. So here I am, starting off a topic.

Generally, when I start helping someone, I try to figure out his level of experience. That determines what I can start pushing to him so he can actually understand what I'm going to say.

- beginner: if there is some basic stuff he needs to know before he can get to what he actually in total wants to get, I start telling about the basic stuff
- advanced: I guide more directly to the question, assuming he knows the basics required to do what he must do
- expert: if possible, I tell exactly what he wants, because I can know he already masters the other stuff

That's a lot categorising, but I don't know how I could otherwise try to make a picture of it for you. There are always exceptions of exceptions when I behave differently, it really depends on what is the actual subject and the problem.

One of the most important things for me to is make sure whomever I am helping actually learns something. So, I might give help, but I might leave something to be figured out. This way I hope to make him think and find possible errors all by himself. To what I know, people learn best from their errors and also when they get embarrassed. People want to avoid that, thus they learn well to not get into that situatation again.

It maybe sounds more rude than what I want it to sound like, but that's just what I think is a good way to teach. And now that I used that word, maybe I am of a teacher nature, even though in real life I'm not that good of a teacher (yeah, I once had a course where I had to be a teacher... it was pretty much a disaster - but I survived).


So, any other thoughts? Is there something wrong with my way of helping or do you have a (completely) different point of view to this?

As long as someone isn't asking me to do all the work for them then I don't care to pitch a hand. But if it's someone asking for someone to do their homework, asking how to take advantage of buffer overflows (code injection) or crack security of any kind, I won't help at all.

When I do help someone though, I'll try to answer thier question with accuracy. If I know of pitfalls one should watch out for I'll mention it.

[wossname]

Why help people out at all? **** 'em.

Let 'em hang.