I much prefer Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/ and https://jvns.ca/blog/answer-questions-well/
Regarding the "lowly questioner" dynamic, look at it this way: if you're asking someone a question about their software, you're seeking to extract time from someone in order to extract value from something that they created. Be humble.
https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/ covers both of those topics in detail, in my opinion.
I don't think it's saying that. It's just saying "the person you're asking owes you nothing, is probably very busy at best, and may be a self-important jerk at worst, this is probably the most effective way to ask them for help."
(There's nothing wrong with being defensive of your time. There's something very wrong with being a jerk about it.)
Quoting directly from the document:
> you are one of the idiots we are talking about
> leave us alone and everybody will be happier
> What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to
> We call people like this “losers” (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it “lusers”).
> J. Random Hacker is quite likely to reply with a uselessly literal answer while thinking “Stupid question...”, and hoping the experience of getting what you asked for rather than what you needed will teach you a lesson.
> Stupid:
> we can't be bothered
> will make you come off like a giggly teenage girl, which is not generally a good idea unless you are more interested in sex than answers
The entire section entitled "RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up", especially things like:
> You shouldn't be offended by this; by hacker standards, your respondent is showing you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring you. You should instead be thankful for this grandmotherly kindness.
> The same place I'd find it, fool
> J. Random Hacker's response to this is likely to be “Right. Do you need burping and diapering, too?”
> While muttering RTFM is sometimes justified
(no, it isn't)
- Terms like "ruthless" used as praise.
- Numerous attempts to praise lack of basic decency and excuse bad behavior in the community.
- A pervasive "us" and "you" approach to othering the lowly petitioner, despite claiming to want to welcome them.
The above is a partial list of reasons why not to recommend that particular document, and why to seek out and recommend better ones. I've seen people recommend this particular document while simultaneously attempting to excuse it; better would be to write it off as a hopeless bit of elitist historical interest, recommend better documents that already exist, and update any such documents to include any useful information that they might lack.
This is an inaccurate and dismissive description. This document is actively hostile, and revels in its hostility. It's propagating a perspective that it's acceptable to deride and denigrate newbies, that it's acceptable to be hostile and toxic and unwelcoming, and so on. It gleefully celebrates, or at the very least excuses, people who throw around "RTFM" and "STFU noob" and "UTSL". Propagating this document encourages people to think such behavior is a good idea.
We can, and should, build better hacker communities, and this document has no place in those.
> personally. I'd like to think most folks attempting to build/repair/maintain systems built by other people can too.
You might like to think that, but that assumption excludes many people from the community, in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle (where "vicious" is a particularly appropriate word). It creates communities that exclude people who are not like you. And even those who can should not have to. I can cope with such people, but it's painful and draining, so I spend more time in communities where such hostility is not accepted.
You might find if you spend time in such communities that you may enjoy them more as well. Or perhaps not, but either way don't make things worse for others.
The right response to such hostility is "we don't do that here".
The ideals you've posited sound pleasant initially, but they bear little resemblance to being able to do real work in the messy, impatient, human-infested world others live in. Would it be nice to eschew the linux kernel, or the openbsd community, because a large fraction of those folks meet the ESR 'busy hacker with attitude' definition? Sure. Would it be career-killing to say "Linus/Theo were curt with me, _how wude_, let me agonize over it on my Tumblr and waste dev cycles finding another kernel/crypto library/whatever"? Absolutely.
ESR's guide is pragmatic, and far more effective at solving the real problem in front of the questioner, than the "pout and shun" methodology you've espoused.
You seem to be reading more into that statement than I've actually said. You're also attempting to ascribe a ridiculously patronizing tone that is of course easy to argue against, having been artificially constructed for that purpose rather than representing any actual position I've stated. I didn't say "don't use Linux because LKML is awful"; that would indeed be counterproductive. I'm saying "make new communities more friendly and welcoming than LKML, and don't encourage or excuse being awful to others".
Are you actually attempting to claim the document has no issues at all? Or are you simply trying to claim that despite its issues the document also contains useful information? I'm not arguing against the latter, simply stating that that's a good reason to create and propagate new documents that don't have those issues. If you're trying to claim the former, you've done nothing to actually support that position or reply to the detailed list of such issues.