

Help Vampires: A Spotter's Guide - ivank
http://slash7.com/pages/vampires

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patio11
I do customer support for a non-technical market. Name an issue, my customers
have had it -- they can't print when the printer isn't plugged in but the
print later button doesn't work, etc. (You might describe this as "I can't
save.", since your model of what a program does is a bit more sophisticated
than hers is. Plumbing that mental model took a day of wading through some
fairly exasperated emails.)

A lot of small software developers think that I must be going totally insane
with questions like that. Honestly, no, I could do this forever. I have two
main secrets.

One is relentless focus on ease of use, because you CAN find ways to take your
existing program, business, and business processes and simplify them so that
there are less places to have errors.

The other is that you can never have contempt of your users. Not even quietly
to yourself. Don't call them Help Vampires, even mentally. You'll poison
yourself, you will start to _dread_ the You've Got Mail light, and you will
find answering questions exhausting instead of a routine task which you're
paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

P.S. Charge more. If there were such a thing as Help Vampires, and there is
not despite the fang-marks in your neck, charging more would be a cross
against them. You'll almost invariably find the most difficult people at the
bottom of a market.

~~~
gdee
>> The other is that you can never have contempt of your users... which you're
paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

In all fairness... those are clients then. Totally different situation.

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blasdel
While Help Vampires in software development skew male, that's easily
attributable to the field's sausage-fest reality.

In the general population, I think that Help Vampires skew female to a large
degree. Witness Yahoo Answers (and to a lesser degree Ask Metafilter, from
which it was cloned). The vast majority of the askers are female.

~~~
derefr
As far as I've seen, the vast majority of Yahoo Answers _questions_ aren't
really of the "I need help" variety. They're more conversation-starters-in-
question-form. It's a forum.

~~~
twopoint718
I think it depends on the category, but yes, I can see that.

In the more technical areas there are the predictable "Here's a homework
question that I'm sort of trying to disguise" and, what the article said, "How
do I build a forum." What Yahoo Answers REALLY needs is an FAQ in each
category. But, I suppose, then it would be IRC.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Related to, but a different slant on,
<http://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html>

Discussion of that here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682864>

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quellhorst
"It appears that male Help Vampire, drawn as it is to shiny technology,
occupies an evolutionary niche that females of the species simply do not find
desirable."

By a percentage involved in tech, there could be more women help vampires but
because there are fewer women in tech they are rarer than the male version.

~~~
joechung
I have met female help vampires. Unfortunately, they are related to me so
there's not much I can do.

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ionfish
Yet another reason to avoid success at all costs.

