Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

Yes, it is the answer I would give to a 12 year old girl.

First off, why does your 12 year old have to be a girl? You are spouting off about diversity but you basically just used the stereotype that teenage girls are going to cry if you give them the hard truth. Why do we have to treat single mothers with kid gloves? Guess what, diving through some docs is a lot easier than anything a parent has to put up with.

3 of the 4 interns at the company I work for were women last summer, and they kicked ass. While they weren't 12 years old, they were young, and I had no issue telling them to start at the documentation.

There is a massive difference between "read the fucking manual" and suggesting "even if it takes longer, you will be better served starting with the documentation and working through that than googling or using stack overflow". One is bullying, one is teaching.

I always teach my interns to start with the docs. Give the docs 30 minutes before you Google or Stack Overflow. Give that 30 minutes before you ask a senior engineer. Struggling through it is part of the process of learning. The things you learn by going through the docs will help you later.

Or the shorter version, I want to hire someone that can answer Stack Overflow posts not find them.

I consider myself a fairly seasoned programmer. I have written countless lines of code, work on a few projects with friends, and automated most of my computer-related tasks. I've been doing this since I was 12, and I am 19 at the time of writing this.

I can say with confidence, I have never been able to successfully ask a question on stack overflow. I think I have been banned at least once, or they deleted my account.

I've asked questions ranging from implementation of 3D matrix manipulation to avoid gimbal lock to writing a python client-side application that needs to be able to edit a google docs file.

Everything has been closed, locked, or down voted. Each time I followed standard procedures that we are all familiar with for reporting bugs.

  - Include output
  - Sample code 
  - Explanation of what the current code does and what I want it to do
  - Pictures/Diagrams if helpful

I have NEVER gotten a single useful response. Granted it's a great resource for programming information. I use it as a library: I can go there and look at all the books frozen in time, all with good information on a wide variety of topics. But I know, if I attempted to write one of these books or jot down my feelings on the side of a page I'd just get yelled at by the librarians.

There are two things that I have noticed about stack overflow: it's one of a few sites that for some reason prides your identity over your work. Your 'karma' is displayed just as big as your name, and it seems to be implied that the bigger that number is, the more right you are. I have also noticed that most of the resources that are indeed helpful are either locked, closed for 'read only', or every reply is down voted even though the responses and questions are still valid.

I jokingly tell people who are going into CS at my college that "you are not a programmer until you have gotten banned from stack overflow for asking perfectly reasonable questions". Whenever I say that, I can almost hear a sub-audible sigh of relief from everyone in the room including some professors from other departments attempting to learn CS.

Stack overflow is presented as a site for the end user learning how to program. It is not.

I dont think we're disagreeing. I don't suggest speaking practice to the exclusion of literary practice. In this comment you acknowledge the importance of speaking practice. That's what was missing from my reading of your first comment. I responded largely because I understood your comment to suggest (explicitly and through analogy) that new programmers study books before attempting to write code and interact with the community.

Cheers, sorry for the confusion.

learning how to read technical documentation is a skill in its own right, and we all need to practice it in order to get good at it.

obviously some documentation is better than others, and asking specific questions to fill in the gaps where documentation is unclear is a good thing to do.

however, programming is very much driven by learning how to find the answers to problems on your own. often those answers are in the documentation but not always. sometimes they haven't been answered by anyone before and learning how to extrapolate from documentation to understand the behavior of programs in new situations is a skill that has to be developed.

and of course, ultimately, the final authoritative document on how a program will behave is the code itself. there are times when you have to read source. hopefully those are rare occasions, but being capable of doing it when necessary is yet another skill that needs to be developed. reading through an unfamiliar codebase is difficult and requires practice and experience.

all of these technical reading skills need to be practiced. beginners frequently make the mistake of denying themselves opportunities to practice those skills by simply asking for someone to tell them the answer.

> Ever go to a gym and ask someone how to do a basic lift only to be scoffed at? Ever been to a foreign country and have someone berate you for not understanding how to navigate through some strange process or not knowing how to speak their language well enough?

That's not asking, that's demanding that someone teach you. Its a brazen form of entitlement that completely disregards the state of the other person.

In regards to the gym, I don't go to the gym to wait around to randomly help some other person with their lifting techniques. I squeeze in going to the gym before or after work, to try to get in my exercise before I get home, so I don't die at 40. Don't be a dick and expect me to drop everything I'm doing because you don't know what you are doing. I am, literally, not here to help you.

If you really want somebody who is waiting around to help you, then your in luck: They are called personal trainers, and you can pay them to help you! If you don't have the money do that, then (god-forbid) you google it or get a book from the library and make a best effort on your own before getting pissy at me because I have other priorities than to make your life easier/less emotionally distressing.