At 19:50 04/09/2010, xxxxx@hotmail.com wrote:
However, as far as programming mistakes are concerned, some of us
(those who mainly answer questions, btw ) try everything they can
before asking for the external assistance, while those happen to be
on the asking side on the regular basis tend to scream “SOS!!!
HELP!!!” without taking ANY steps to investigate the issue -
instead, they would prefer if someone else did all work for them. I
can be, indeed, hard with the latter type of posters.
Anton may not be everybody’s favourite list member, but there is a
very serious point here. Those who tend to scream for help on every
step of the way are probably not cut out to be a professional in this
type of career.
As a driver writer it seems that most experienced and learned list
members have gone through the very painful experience of identifying
a problem or a bug that is the fault of product supplied by someone
else. More often than not the driver writer works for the smallest
fish in the chain, hence all the bigger guys shrug their shoulders
and say that it must be your fault and nothing to do with them or
their products.
You want the big guys to fix their products, or even just acknowledge
that they have a problem (there can be significant commercial
pressure on this last bit since your boss doesn’t want his company
sued for failing to deliver).
The only way to get the attention of those big guys is to research
and understand the problem until you know it backwards. You know all
the steps and conditions to recreate it and you can list all the
things you have tried to get around it. When you submit your
findings you have to be 100% sure that there is no flaw in your
reasoning. If there is any flaw, those big guys will dismiss you
(and your company) as lightweight and you’ll never get another
response. Conversely, by showing your technical competence and
ability to correctly analyse a problem you gain credibility with
those big guys and they will listen to you in the future.
Many of the regular list responders will have been in this
position. They know how important it is to show how much effort you
have made to understand a problem before asking for assistance. When
they ask for some effort to be made by the poster, they really do
know what such effort should be.
What is generally most exasperating on the list is the number of
questions posted by the ‘screamers’ that could have been answered by
themselves with a bit of nouse and adding debug statements to their
code or RTFM.
It should be remembered that participation in this list is voluntary,
very busy people take time to answer questions. No one is obliged to
answer and the more one is perceived as a ‘screamer’ the less likely
there is to be an answer - or at least a polite and useful answer.
Mark.
