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Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

sonyaellenmann.com

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Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#41

Post by reitanqild »

mhurron wrote: post #37
reitanqild wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe just maybe add a rule that you must lurk before asking questions? When the site clearly looks like as a place for noobs to get questions answered for free then maybe don't complain that you get just that.

If they would search for the answer to their question, they would get it right now instead of waiting for someone to come in and answer the same question yet again. If you are starting out with something new, someone has already had the same problem you are. Your question has already been asked and answered.

Not sure I understand your comment. My take is that would be a good thing if beginners learned to search first.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#42

Post by callumlocke »

The other StackExchange sites are just as bad. I once had a physics question (I'm not a scientist, I was just curious) and I asked it on the Physics SE site. The result was a torrent of intelligent, articulate people telling me my question was stupid and that I should not have asked it. Imagine if a curious schoolkid had that experience, they could be put off physics for life. StackOverflow etc. can be useful at times, but it has a pedantic and hostile culture that is anathema to learning.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#43

Post by yoo1I »

reitanqild wrote: post #31
droope wrote: post #28

Welcome to the programming community! People are generally kind and willing to help, but there is one caveat: there is frequently little patience for questions which you could have resolved yourself. With time you'll both learn to identify these and to write your questions in a way that it reflects that you've "done your research."

Problem is when you are stumped with some small detail you have missed. I must admit I have come to the point were I unconsciously just don't ask questions on SO and instead try another hour on my own instead of even trying to ask.

I find that in preparing a question that is specific and answerable, includes everything needed to resolve it and anticipates criticism about not having done enough research myself, I'm usually able to answer the question I had myself, and even find stupid typos or or other silly little details.

In the cases that this process doesn't lead me to an answer, oftentimes I discover that either my question is too broad to be answerable, or that I am missing general education in the area and my actual question is somewhere further down.

So really the impatience and hostility towards bad questions, is a tool I use to aid me in finding answers myself.

That all sounds a little smug, but when I am stuck even after this process and actually post my research on SO or IRC or to a mailing list, too many times I get one-line answers about the tiny thing I was missing... but at least then nobody thought I was just being lazy.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#44

Post by jrumbut »

mehrdada wrote: post #15

I had been participating in Stack Overflow since its public beta (though I'm not an active participant anymore), and this topic comes up every now and then, but the astronomical growth of Stack Overflow has not stopped. The composition of all-time high users are also quite a bit different from a few years ago. I am not saying there is not a problem, but I take complaints like this with a grain of salt these days. End…

What I think the experienced users are missing is that newbie questions are an opportunity to let a newbie answerer learn to teach. When I decided I wanted to start helping out on SO I found it almost impossible for months because the easy questions were instantly shut down with a frustrated response from an elder statesman user.

It's like when there's one guy who has maintained a system for years and won't let anyone else touch it but also complains about having no time for other projects. Eventually he has to let someone new take over parts of it, even if it means that at first it takes a little longer and it's not done quite the way he would.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#45

Post by philwebster »

Another example of SO managing to alienate a user (in this case, me): Posting my very first answer to a question, finding a very similar post and adding my solution there as well, then getting an email that I had posted the same thing and that the second post would be removed. This was unfortunate because the second question had a more lively discussion and seemed like a better place for the answer. I deleted the first answer, tried re-posting on the second question and wasn't allowed. After that, I gave up.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#46

Post by an_ko »

reitanqild wrote: post #30
Veedrac wrote: post #26

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow i…

Then maybe just maybe add a rule that you must lurk before asking questions? When the site clearly looks like as a place for noobs to get questions answered for free then maybe don't complain that you get just that.

"Duration of membership" seems a much less relevant metric here than "quality of post".

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#47

Post by michaelbuckbee »

Joeri wrote: post #34
Veedrac wrote: post #26

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow i…

Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking for off-site resources or asking for opinions. To be honest I don't even know what a good SO question is anymore, and i have 8000+ rep. You may believe the current rules and moderator brute squads work to keep the site clean, but from where i'm standing they work to ma…

Do you think that maybe it is that all of the questions that can be succinctly summed up in a tidy Q+A fashion have been asked within the languages you work in?

I was messing around with Elixir (which is newish in the scheme of thing) and it's very different than asking about Rails/Ruby.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#48

Post by danbruc »

tajen wrote: post #29
toyg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run. Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to bec…

Where are we supposed to get opinions from? Would we have a success if we started "OpinionStack.com"? I believe if we did so, we should outdate the votes, so the top answer would be the most fashionable nowadays .

Code Review [1] is a thing. But that comes with the same problems - nobody wants to review reading from a text file in language X over and over again.

[1] http://codereview.stackexchange.com

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#49

Post by sklivvz1971 »

Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod.

Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. There are more than 30 million posts, 12 millions of which are questions.

Yeah, we have to close a lot of them, and we keep the ones which we can answer. Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason. We aim to build a library that will last for years longer than solving the problem for a single person.

Another thing that people don't get is that Stack Overflow is basically a school. When programmers say their profession is a life-long learning exercise... they do it mainly on Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers. We can only ask them to be nice, but you can't expect everyone to be exactly how you expect. It just won't happen.

While we do moderate rudeness, it can only be a post-hoc exercise where users help us identify such behavior.

EDIT: I removed a paragraph that was very misleading and added a clearer one. Sorry about that.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#50

Post by Veedrac »

Joeri wrote: post #34
Veedrac wrote: post #26

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow i…

Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking for off-site resources or asking for opinions. To be honest I don't even know what a good SO question is anymore, and i have 8000+ rep. You may believe the current rules and moderator brute squads work to keep the site clean, but from where i'm standing they work to ma…

Note that asking for opinions is frequently handled through Programmers.SE. Also, "too specific" hasn't been a close reason for quite a while now (and probably never applied to you anyway).
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