
Getting Answers - tpaschalis
https://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html
======
l0b0
In my experience IRC is absolutely the worst place to ask technical questions.
You have to be there at the same time as someone who knows the answer, you
have to stick around and be ready to respond if someone replies, all the while
multi-tasking to filter out all the other conversations in case the responder
doesn't use your nick in the response, once you get a response you either have
to clunkily weave your conversation into a bunch of other chat or use a direct
chat, and the chance of anyone else ever seeing your question _and_ locating
the answer is tiny, going to zero if you use direct chat after the initial
response. And as the author says, you can't paste more than a line of code
without breaking netiquette.

A close second is mailing lists, which the author does mention. I think it's
pretty well established that the only way a mailing list can be pleasant to
read is if every single participant is uses the same mail client and formats
their responses identically, taking great pains to format the exact same way,
which has never happened.

There is already a solution which naturally encourages all the good behaviour
in this article: Stack Overflow and co.

~~~
ken
In my experience, StackOverflow has become oversaturated, while IRC is as good
as it ever was.

There's so many questions on StackOverflow these days you're counting on luck
that someone (qualified) sees your question. Most questions I've asked in the
past year never get to even 10 views, or 1 answer. Another problem is that
you're not supposed to respond unless you have The Answer, so if you don't
happen to get an expert to read it, you often get nothing at all. Some fields
seem to be perpetually full of beginners -- Lisp-related tags are often loaded
with "help with hello world" questions.

StackOverflow also has the Close Police, who seem to patrol questions looking
for any excuse to close it. Even after 10 years, I can't predict when a
question might be flagged.

On IRC, there might be only 5 people actively participating in a channel, but
100 lurkers. When you ask a question, people respond with suggestions even if
they don't have The Answer, and this often leads to a workable solution.

The average quality of response on IRC is much higher, as well. A lot of the
lurkers are actually semi-famous developers. On more than one occasion, I've
asked how to do something like $(app) does, and someone says "$(dev) here
wrote $(app), just ask them!".

StackOverflow is from the social media generation of software, where you need
a pretty avatar, and accumulate points, and there's rules you must not break.
IRC is from the pre-web generation of software, where there are no absolute
rules, and you just want to get shit done.

~~~
l0b0
Weird. I was on IRC for many years before Stack Overflow (and crap
alternatives like Experts Exchange, Yahoo! Answers, etc) existed, and I have
pretty much the exact opposite experience. For example, while SO tags
certainly have different distributions of expertise, out of my most recent 30
questions (involving mainly Python, Django, Docker, Rust and WebExtensions)
only four have no answers yet.

> StackOverflow is from the social media generation of software, where you
> need a pretty avatar, and accumulate points, and there's rules you must not
> break.

Unlike IRC, where people need to learn and adopt the particular culture of a
channel, and (in extreme cases) need to supplicate before the right people to
get a civil response.

Stack* is about questions and answers, learning and doing.

~~~
ken
> Unlike IRC, where people need to learn and adopt the particular culture of a
> channel, and (in extreme cases) need to supplicate before the right people
> to get a civil response.

All (software) IRC channels have basically the same culture. It's essentially
what you mean when you say StackOverflow "naturally encourages all the good
behaviour".

I have no idea what you mean by "supplicate before the right people to get a
civil response". I don't think I've ever seen that. Unlike StackOverflow, you
have the _option_ to ask one person directly, but you're never _obligated_ to.

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dzek69
So nice article, so poorly titled on HN. Kind of irony here.

Missing tip: when creating a new question on Stack or traditional forum: make
your question topic describe the root of the problem. Be concise. You will
increase chance that somebody that potentially knows the answer will come to
help.

Titling your topic "problem", "need help", "my app doesn't work" isn't going
to help you and will frustrate others, usually dealing with people breaking
half of the tips from the article.

~~~
tpaschalis
Sorry for the title, I preferred keeping the original one. Mike's blog has
quite interesting stuff!

As for your other point, yes, with all the negativity that StackOverflow
sometimes exhibits, I really feel that the pressure/urge for users to create a
"Minimal, Complete, Verifiable" example [0] is part of the site's appeal, and
part of the reason of the high quality of responses you sometimes find there.

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve](https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve)

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User23
Read and understand the output before asking for help. I know this sounds
ridiculous or even condescending, but anyone who has worked in this field long
enough knows what I mean.

~~~
lozenge
I include an intranet URL in many error messages at my company, users ignore
them and still ask.

~~~
dhimes
That's a great idea (of course, you can't let it rot).

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victor106
I keep realizing that asking good questions is a truly important skill in any
profession and any situation.

Couple of books I found useful :-

A more beautiful question - Warren Berger Power Questions - Andrew Sobel
Secrets of Question Based Selling - Thomas Freese.

~~~
tpaschalis
I feel that what we describe as "soft skills" and that many people discredit,
like being professional, being able to clearly communicate problems,
solutions, ideas or being always willing-to learn could be better labelled as
"Professional Skills".

While they're not a substitute for technical adequacy, at the end of the day,
we have real people as co-workers, clients, bosses, and we provide services to
them, and those skills are of utmost importance, and should be part of the
interviewing process.

Also, thanks for the resources, I'll be checking them out. ;)

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theothermkn
As I read this, I ruminated on my travails at getting a standard USB mouse to
work on Ubuntu 18.04. I didn’t ask any questions in forums, largely because
all of my hours of searches revealed an entitled community responding to other
questioners with NIH (It’s a hardware problem, even though your hardware works
on other OSs.), instructions that demonstrably don’t work, or just not
responding at all. I don’t mean to take anything away from the author’s fine
article; it truly is good. But there can be toxic communities. There can be
problems that are entirely opaque to the uninitiated. (Who configures mice in
2019?) And there can be problems for which Googling sends you down a maze of
dismissive and entitled responses.

Also, if anyone here has gotten an Anker vertical USB mouse to stay awake,
scroll smoothly, and click reliably on a clean install of 18.04, I’m all ears.
:D

~~~
explainplease
I guess it's not what you want to hear, but that probably _is_ a hardware
problem. It may work on other OSes, but if it's not behaving correctly, then
it's probably not a well-behaved USB device. And there may be software
workarounds--but it's probably ultimately a hardware problem. So you should
probably complain to the manufacturer and tell them to get with it and either
fix the mouse or upstream a Linux driver that works around its bugs.

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wawhal
Mildly unrelated, but there should be a nice and polite in-person variation of
RTFM. It is certainly annoying when certain questions are asked but they are
just a google away.

~~~
dhimes
Indeed. But the worst thing someone can do is leave a comment like that on
Stack Overflow. Invariably, SO shows up at the top of google's search, so
later people with the same question will read that and say "duh- that's how I
got here."

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explainplease
I disagree that ESR's HTAQTSW is condescending. The fact that people, over
years of time, have written and updated that guide for the benefit of others
is the opposite of condescending. IMO calling it condescending is tantamount
to violating rule #7 from this guide.

And I disagree that "RTFM" is a useless answer. When it's correct, it's the
most useful answer one can get. To put it another way, it's only useless if
one refuses to accept it--which is, again, like violating rule #7.

There might be a place for an abridged version of HTAQTSW, but I don't think
this is it, because it doesn't improve upon it, and it denigrates it.

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donarb
While somewhat related to point 8 (Follow up after getting an answer), my pet
peeve is people who post about a problem they are having, not getting any
response, then a final "Oh, never mind, I figured it out".

Auuggghhhh! The forums you use are a great resource not just for you but for
others. A posted solution could help other people who are searching for the
same question.

