How to avoid humiliating newcomers: A guide for advanced developers

It's fine to humiliate newcomers as long as you're fine making enemies. As a recent university grad, most people entering CS today are not geeks or nerds or whatever--they're more and more the high IQ people who just want to make money. These people have higher social skills and self-esteem then traditional geeks. The truth is that most programming done today is pretty easy and does not require deep technical skills, so these guys can really advance without problem anyway. Being an asshole means that you're 2-10 years out from people with better social skills than you and hate you advancing into management. At least that's how I read the current trends.

I wonder if the underlying reason for this emotional response is guilt which goes hand-in-hand with altruism. In the case of the Santa and the homeless man, the Santa didn't want to give the man $5, but did so presumably out of guilt, then felt angry. In the case of the author getting angry about low-value questions, I wonder if that's because of a guilty feeling that they must answer. Personally, I can't really empathise with the author's anger, yet I'm arguably less generous than them; I don't feel much drive to spend my free time on Stack Overflow et al. answering stangers' questions.

> I am unable to count the number of times I've gone to some random project community for assistance dealing with whatever problem I was having at the time to be met with someone telling me that what I'm doing is insane and shouldn't be done in the first place.

There should be an explicit three-way breakdown for this:

1. You're having trouble because of a bug, either yours or ours. If it's yours, the helpful thing is to help you fix it. If it's ours, obviously all projects should accept bug reports gracefully and work on them in some kind of reasonable fashion.

2. You've hit a deliberate design limitation, which isn't a bug as far as we're concerned, but we're willing to acknowledge it's annoying. This might turn into a feature request.

3. This is out-of-scope for our project. You picked the wrong tool. Getting us to change scope probably isn't going to be done using a bug report. That should be stated politely and without denigrating you or your problem.

What should not happen is what you describe: Developers fitting problems into a Procrustean bed and cutting off the bits which don't fit the pre-designed mold, and then claiming that this cut-down problem is all anyone would ever need to solve. It's sometimes inevitable that you have to simplify the solution by simplifying the problem, but never pretend that a solution thus simplified is complete.

    [09:00]  Hi.
    [09:16]  Hey, what's up.
    [09:23]  I have a problem, do you have some time?
    [09:24]  Sure, what's it about?
    [09:27]  Have you worked with X thing before? I have to do Y thing but don't know how.
    [09:28]  So, I just googled "how to do Y thing in X thing" and got this blog entry explaining in detail, and also this other Stack Overflow answer with a very similar problem.
    [09:29]  Sec, gonna try that.
    [09:35]  I got this error "someVariable is not defined". What's it mean?

sigh

    [09:36]  You're trying to use a variable that doesn't exist. Can you paste the code you're using?
    [09:37]  (Code)
    [09:37]  Replace "someVariable" for "someOtherVariable" and it should work.
    [09:38]  It works, thanks!

I really, really try to be nice, but there's a limit on how many situations like this I can handle before losing my sanity.

It's absolutely true that you should be nice to people, but let me also issue a similar warning to newcomers not to ask questions in a way that inspires rage.

Programming is, in a very abstract sense, a dirty job. We get paid well, have great benefits, perks, and mobility, but we are the toilet scrubbers of the software world. We spend whole days hunting semicolons, or trying to reverse engineer bug reports that no one remembers writing. I've spent a whole week trying to move a button over about an inch in all supported browsers just to make the product "pixel perfect". I've spent a whole month trying to figure out how to use a SaaS feature as advertised that had sparse documentation and no tech support.

Some newcomers really don't understand/believe that, and think it's acceptable to run for help every time something frustrates them... do everyone a favor and don't be that person, please.