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Does Not Work

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Re: Does Not Work

#21

Post by CuriousCosmic »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #6
endgame wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, and there's http://nohello.com to point people in the right direction.

> The same goes for "Hello -- Are you there?", "Hi Bob -- quick question.", "Do you have a sec ?", "yt?" and "ping". Just ask the question! Actually, I'd prefer that coworkers don't start blowing up my phone/PC with chat alert beeps for an extended question until they've confirmed that I'm not in a meeting/trying to concentrate/etc.

I think the idea was that the message should be composed as one submission rather than a series of short comments strung together.

Re: Does Not Work

#22

Post by jayajay »

saghm wrote: post #20
mastre_ wrote: post #12

Cuts both ways tho. There are developers (some good, most not) who are notorious about not testing their code. "I don't know dude, it doesn't seem to work -- did you test it?" is fair game in these cases, especially once a pattern has been established. As in, why don't you look into it and figure out why it doesn't work instead of asking me to do it for you? As in, letme-not-googlethatforyou. Of course, depending on…

> One pet peeve is people who ask "can I ask you a question?" Back when I was TA'ing a course in college, about half of the students on average in office hours would start their conversations with me by saying "I just have one small question." I'm not sure what was worse, when they didn't just have one question (or it wasn't small) or when the question was so small they could have gotten an answer by the time they fi…

I could see myself getting annoyed if it's a student I have never seen before. I absolutely adore and love it when the same students come to office hours every time. For some reason, it makes me very content and happy, and it's just such a pleasure to see eager students utilizing resources like that. Those students, I am much more casual with, and couldn't care less if they talk to me on that meta "can I ask you a question?" level.

Re: Does Not Work

#23

Post by saghm »

jayajay wrote: post #22
saghm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One pet peeve is people who ask "can I ask you a question?" Back when I was TA'ing a course in college, about half of the students on average in office hours would start their conversations with me by saying "I just have one small question." I'm not sure what was worse, when they didn't just have one question (or it wasn't small) or when the question was so small they could have gotten an answer by the time they fi…

I could see myself getting annoyed if it's a student I have never seen before. I absolutely adore and love it when the same students come to office hours every time. For some reason, it makes me very content and happy, and it's just such a pleasure to see eager students utilizing resources like that. Those students, I am much more casual with, and couldn't care less if they talk to me on that meta "can I ask you a qu…

I didn't really mind it that much, I mostly found it amusing that students were so worried about taking up too much time that they'd end up taking more. And you're right, if it was one of the regulars, I definitely didn't mind, and I'd sometimes tease them mildly about it.

Re: Does Not Work

#24

Post by haimez »

Tade0 wrote: post #4

> If you are experiencing a problem of the nature of one of the first two in that list (does not compile or has a run-time exception), then somewhere, you’ve got an error message or an exception, and probably even a line number. Thing is, in this particular project I'm in - most of the time - you don't. Since our project is an in-browser text editor most of our bugs occur because the browser did something unexpected,…

Sounds like you need a managed runtime. Wait... You already have one, it's just a bigger problem than solution. Hrm... Have you considered making a real IDE?

Re: Does Not Work

#25

Post by strken »

I've found that "this doesn't work" usually means "I've spent the past three hours on this and I want someone else to take a fresh look at it before I go insane" with my co-workers. In the case where someone doesn't provide more information because their brain is on fire and they're starting to get stressed out about the problem, it's easier to just help them and trust they'll do the same for you.

Having said that, with a team that's spent less time around each other, you might not have that level of consensus.

Re: Does Not Work

#26

Post by astine »

fenomas wrote: post #15
mastre_ wrote: post #12

Cuts both ways tho. There are developers (some good, most not) who are notorious about not testing their code. "I don't know dude, it doesn't seem to work -- did you test it?" is fair game in these cases, especially once a pattern has been established. As in, why don't you look into it and figure out why it doesn't work instead of asking me to do it for you? As in, letme-not-googlethatforyou. Of course, depending on…

> "can I ask you a question?" .. doesn't seem to serve any purpose I think of it as a request for a context switch. If you're mentally occupied - writing a tricky recursive function, say - and somebody walks up and says, "Hey, what's the time complexity of inserts into a red-black tree", it's likely that just parsing the question will kick you out of your current context so you lose track of what you're doing.

I find that for me, "Hey are you busy?" is enough to drag me out of my focus. At that point you may as well ask me about the time complexity of red-black tree inserts. That way I get the request over with and back to what I was doing.

Re: Does Not Work

#27

Post by conradev »

> When programmers come to me and simply say “this code does not work,” I send them away. Their problem is not solvable by me or anyone.

When people come to me and say that, I ask "in what way doesn't it work?" and figure out how to help them.

Re: Does Not Work

#28

Post by somethingsright »

notatoad wrote: post #10
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same goes for "Hello -- Are you there?", "Hi Bob -- quick question.", "Do you have a sec ?", "yt?" and "ping". Just ask the question! Actually, I'd prefer that coworkers don't start blowing up my phone/PC with chat alert beeps for an extended question until they've confirmed that I'm not in a meeting/trying to concentrate/etc.

if you're in a meeting/trying to concentrate/etc, then why is your chat status still set to available?

Because I am available for certain questions. I am available for "quick" questions which only I would know the answer to, and for critical questions. I want to defer "easy" questions which the questioner can easily find the answer to, but is lazy or incompetent. In my role, I will get questions from downright simple "how do I reset my password", or was a certain move-to-production done; to some really critical ones, or, where others move on my go-ahead. The move-to-production query means different things based on who is asking. One person asks only because a end-user or their manager wants to know the status. Another person is asking that as a start of "we are seeing something strange in production" on a related functionality. So, I ignore the first person when actually busy, and attend to the second person right away always.

Also, there are people change the status to 'busy' when they are not actually available, extended lunches and what-not. And there are more people who forget to reset their status to 'available'. So setting status to 'busy' is no guarantee that you will not get a ping. Or a phone-call.

Re: Does Not Work

#29

Post by userbinator »

saghm wrote: post #20
mastre_ wrote: post #12

Cuts both ways tho. There are developers (some good, most not) who are notorious about not testing their code. "I don't know dude, it doesn't seem to work -- did you test it?" is fair game in these cases, especially once a pattern has been established. As in, why don't you look into it and figure out why it doesn't work instead of asking me to do it for you? As in, letme-not-googlethatforyou. Of course, depending on…

> One pet peeve is people who ask "can I ask you a question?" Back when I was TA'ing a course in college, about half of the students on average in office hours would start their conversations with me by saying "I just have one small question." I'm not sure what was worse, when they didn't just have one question (or it wasn't small) or when the question was so small they could have gotten an answer by the time they fi…

I experienced the "can I ask you a question?" when I did that in office hours. My usual response is "Yes, what did you think I was here for?" After two or three times they just learned to ask the questions directly.

Re: Does Not Work

#30

Post by douche »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #6
endgame wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, and there's http://nohello.com to point people in the right direction.

> The same goes for "Hello -- Are you there?", "Hi Bob -- quick question.", "Do you have a sec ?", "yt?" and "ping". Just ask the question! Actually, I'd prefer that coworkers don't start blowing up my phone/PC with chat alert beeps for an extended question until they've confirmed that I'm not in a meeting/trying to concentrate/etc.

Alternatively, if you're in one of those not-available states, most IM clients have some kind of facility to publish that availability...
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