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Comment by b0afc375b5 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't read the article, but just based on the passages you have quoted and based on my recent experience, I will have to agree with the author.

I recently learned that GitHub has a discussions page which is separate from the issues pages. To pass the time and to give back to the community I try to help people and answer their questions.

It's a bit concerning to me that when I point some people to the right direction by making suggestions, linking to the docs, or linking to a relevant stackoverflow answer, they are unable to formulate an answer for their problem. Sometimes I literally have to create a reproduction repository so that they can see how the answer I gave can solve their problem.

I am not concluding anything here. But this has been my experience so far when engaging the community of an open source frontend framework.

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> I recently learned that GitHub has a discussions page which is separate from the issues pages.

The people who are good won't be using that.

When I was a student working on my thesis I realised I was too advanced to ask questions on stackoverflow and I would not be receiving useful help there. My issues were too uncommon and specific, because the simple ones that stackoverflow is good at solving were not blocking me.

I guess something similar happens there, with the extra thing that very few people know and use discussion pages.

The fun of programming begins at the point that stackoverflow/Google begins to cease providing ready-made answers.

This is the reason why blogs should exist

The only things worth posting to them are information you yourself weren't able to find on the internet.

This isn't a new phenomenon. This strategy is proven to work largely because of people like you who put in time and effort to answer those types of questions with quality information. Stack Overflow was literally built on this very premise.

On the one hand I hate help vampires who appear to show no effort and just want "gimme da codez!"

On the other hand, it's impossible to remember what it was like to not know something. So often, just giving hints isn't enough. When I used to spend too much time answering S.O. questions I tried to, as often as possible, include a working snippet. One, to prove the solution worked, but two, so the questioner could start with working code.

Starting with working code is the number 1 thing for me because then I can start adding to it until it breaks and can always go back to working.

Maybe, but in some (many) cases you’d be better off spending the time developing your general knowledge of whatever it is you are working on to the point of solving your problem. This will not only solve your problem but also make you a better engineer. This is especially true with complex/dense material (e.g. kubernetes) where a lot of the learning is generally applicable.

Back in the day these phenomena were also observed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

I don't know if it's the whole new generation or only the web/nerdy part of it.

Mostly likely it's neither, and the problems we notice is due to a very biased sample.

We don't see the many thousands who solve problems quietly, and even when we see them we tend to make note only of the most unskilled ones.

Compounding this with the fact that all over the world more people are motivated to learn and work in IT we are simply bound to see more extreme outliers.

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