It Hurts to Ask [pdf]
scholar.princeton.edu
scholar.princeton.edu
When we had more and more engineers join, including interns, I made sure they heard the same thing I did and felt comfortable asking any questions. I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). I will repeat it to the point where it's likely annoying during mentoring and onboarding meetings, but people will be very open with their questions, which I'm very happy with. It takes a bit of extra time out of everyone's day to respond to questions, but you're unblocking someone in 2 chunks of 10 minutes (mentor and mentee) which saves the mentee upwards of hours, and this can compound with future situations if they don't have a complete understanding of the situation.
I really appreciate a question friendly culture and I would never want to work at a place that isn't like that again.
I used to participate in StackOverflow, quite a bit (not so much, these days).
They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site.
Just look at the question counts of the high-numbered folks. It's usually a single-digit number, with that digit frequently being "0."
It's fairly obvious that people that actually ask questions are treated badly.
I totally disagree!
I have 50k rep on StackOverflow, and roughly a quarter of that comes from the questions I've asked (I have 213 questions, 166 answers). In fact, that is my favorite way to interact with the site; I personally get excited when I find a question of mine that isn't answered on StackOverflow.
That said, writing a good question is an art. The impression that SO has a culture of not asking questions I think is at least partly impacted by the aspects of the culture that came into existence to deal with the huge deluge of really bad questions that it gets literally every second of every day.
Then, even if you put in the time and effort to actually write a well researched and thought out question, it's not uncommon to get close votes and downvotes. This is unfortunate, but it also usually comes from a small fraction of users who see your question within its first 5 minutes of posting. Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.
Well, I guess we'll just have to "agree to disagree," then...
I have "only" about a 4.5K rep, but almost twice as many questions as answers. Most of my rep comes from questions.
My SO tagline is "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."
I have become quite good at writing really good, well-researched questions, which usually get ignored. I generally end up answering them, myself.
Instead, simple ones get answered; often with a somewhat passive-aggressive "slap." I've learned to ignore the insult, and still be nice and thankful for the answer.
It's been a valuable resource for me, but is now a lot less valuable.
Only if your question is common, and possibly common enough to already have an answer. That's rarely the case for me, and this issue is why I've stopped using SO beyond just reading.
I asked this question on the math site https://mathoverflow.net/questions/373993/is-the-haversine-f...
I am not a "math person" and was struggling to understand how these various functions fit into "norms" or not.
I think by-and-large none of these communities are helpful or welcoming to most people. And that is a shame.
Though these days even professional questions are sometimes treated poorly.
Apparently, you are not supposed to ask non-SEO questions on Webmasters SE.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52060900/strange-behavio...
It has turned into a walled garden where the people who got in early have the credentials to participate and get help while also risking losing the clout that got them there and everyone else has little opportunity to get help overcoming their personal hurdles in becoming competent programmers.
A member of the group (it was a Swift Language group) asked a fairly reasonable developer question. It was sort of a "I have this technical problem, how do I solve it?"
This was something that I had actually solved, many times over, quite easily, so I answered it.
Surprisingly, my answer was ignored, even though it was the first one, and nailed the problem on the head.
Instead, a flood of "answers," came in, all recommending some developer tool/site.
They all got acknowledged. Some resulted in a bit of back-and-forth, between the asker and the answerer.
I noticed that all of the answerers were of the same nationality as the asker, and realized they were shills.
It was "guerrilla marketing."
I use SO all the time but just search for other people's answers and apply them to my existing problem. To some extent this is simply more convenient for me (I don't have to wait and translating a solution to my context builds my skills anyway), but the institutionalized antipathy to general/conceptual questions make it feel like an unfriendly environment.
Volunteer based answering will always lead to some kind of reputation economy, and those seem to attract assholes.
Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to pick the person who answered them best, and failing that, upvotes would decide whom the spoils go to.
It would be easy to game such a system. Ask your question, get the answer, have a sock puppet account also post that answer, pick your sock puppet as the winner, only pay $0.25 for your question to be answered and stiff the person who actually put the work in to solve your problem.
If it were upvote based, people would have multiple sock puppet accounts to upvote their sock puppet answer.
Adding money into the mix makes it more difficult by a massive order of magnitude. Stack Overflow could open a paid noob question area and profit immensely from it, but a newcomer would first have to build the audience, get participation, and then introduce the payment system while working constantly to guard against sock puppets ruining the system.
Anyway, if you are going with this, billing by the question and gathering your answering team by random are sure ways to break it. You have to somehow limit the amount of questions people can ask, have long term relationships with both sides, and make sure the asking ones won't expect that every single question can be answered.
Personally, I would bet on Stack Overflow being positioned in a way where trying this would certainly fail. It looks way more likely that something like a "Red Hat School" could do it.
(But when one can make a comment saying "I know who can enter this market! It's IBM!" that's clearly a problem.)
What benefit is it to learners if search results are full of SO threads going back and forth on the exact same topics across multiple threads?
Sure, it's better for a new programmer to learn how to adapt solutions to fit their use case, and sometimes you will stumble across gold, but there's still a walled garden that decreases the likelihood that a new user will stay around long enough to be able to utilize the resources.
Not to mention the rampant elitism and dismissiveness of the current user base where new users are frequently spoken to rudely and condescendingly, in my experience. There is psychological punishment around every corner for incompetence even though many people try coming there in order to eliminate their incompetence.
The Arduino official forums, for example, are filled with toxic people who are often fairly skilled but whose replies nearly always drip with condescension. It's to the point that when I'm searching for a problem and find a discussion on their forum, I already expect to see it, and I'm nearly always right.
I'm sure there are other similar forums.
To be clear, I am not being facetious/sarcastic; I have this exact problem at the moment (in an open source project) and could use some tips. Surely you (or others) must have run into this. My best idea so far is to throttle my replies proportional to the offences.
Your goal is to introduce them to the usefulness of the tool that is documentation, not to simply unburden yourself of trivial questions. If your documentation is good enough to answer their questions, then sooner or later they will start to use it first, because that's easier than asking a question.
The next thing you can do is ask them if they think the documentation can be improved, so that the answer to their question is easier for the next person to find.
Usually, it's not the substance of the answer that they were struggling to find, but the context that would have lead them there in the first place.
When that happens, it feels like your answer is trivial, but that's because the real value of the interaction was encapsulated into the very act of you answering, not the answer itself.
Documentation can be a great way of referencing nouns and verbs. Good documentation will probably answer "what?" and "how?". Great documentation will answer "where?". The trickiest questions end up being "when?" and "why?".
Tired of answering the same question? Did you write the answer somewhere? Can people find it? No? Then you’re part of this equation, buster.
Some people have trouble turning your advice into a skill they perform routinely (partly because they don't take notes). So you can help them with that by asking them to make notes on what you are showing them, then getting them to send them to you for review.
And if the things really isn't online because it’s proprietary and it’s not explained in the documentation yet, then you get them to write the notes with the view to making that the documentation. So they take up your time on a task that helps them in the company, they pay it back with another task that helps others by reducing the chances that someone else gets stuck in future
Set up a process of converting questions into docs (wiki works). If a question's quality is too low for its answer to be put into docs, delete it. If it is good enough, make an effort to answer and make it easy to contribute it to the documentation. Make sure it's easy to find both Q and A afterward.
Make sure you have a "troubleshooting" section in the docs. Try to assist people with finding the answers on their own as much as you can, but also make sure it's trivial to tell if someone actually read that section and followed the steps outlined there. If you get a question from someone who obviously didn't care to read that, delete it.
Make sure your docs are indexed, searchable, and that you're able to link to specific paragraphs (ideally) or at least headings (but then make sure to actually use headings that make sense). The more precise you are when telling people where they should go, the less likely they are to come back to you to ask again.
In general: make sure good questions (and their authors) are rewarded and make sure people who don't want to put in the work to make their questions good are easily distinguished. Warn the latter once or twice, then punish swiftly and decisively if they don't improve.
Above all else: don't expect your answers to be valued if you, yourself, don't value the time and effort expended to give them. Just because you know something doesn't mean everyone and their cat is entitled to be coached by you. Make it clear that getting an answer from you is a trade: the one with a question has to put in enough time and effort into asking it for you to find it worthwhile to spend your time and effort to answer.
Beware of jerks. Just like you can construct malicious packets that make the receiving server do a lot of work for nothing, it's possible to craft questions that amount to a DoS attack on you. Manage the time spent on answering questions and track it. If servicing a single person takes too much of your time, become suspicious. Taking too much of your time may just be their goal.
Finally: recruit helpers. People who often submit good quality questions probably dislike low quality questions as much as you do. Let them help you filter out the noise.
My 2 c.
> Keep answering the questions, but include a reference to the docs in your answer.
If it's something like how to set up a local development tool, I'll post a link to our documentation and tell them it's near the bottom. I also let them know that if they run into any issues, to let me know and we can hop in a call.
It's also important to see established/senior/experienced people doing it before less-experienced people will be comfortable doing it. I'm the most experienced person on my team and I'm pretty sure I ask more questions and say "I don't know" more than anyone else.
FWIW, many moons ago I wrote an etiquette doc[1] on being a decent community citizen when asking questions on upstream IRC channels (yes, they're still a thing :P) and what to avoid, etc. Many of these guidelines apply in an internal setting too.
"I understand this isn't my decision to make. I just want to be abundantly clear that I think it's the wrong judgment call, and here's why. I think it would be valuable, not only to solve the problem itself, but also to improve our working relationship if you show more value in my perspective in the future. I'm not interested in winning or losing. I am here to work with you."
At the end of the day, one of you is wrong. If that can't be communicated well, then you deserve a better workplace.
Most people I've known in that situation were miserable. It's usually not worth it.
Somewhere along the line in school I realized that whenever I had a question most often many other people did too. I lost my fear of asking questions after a lot of feedback from others: "I'm so glad you asked that question, I was completely lost!"
In my career I realized that nothing had changed, and that asking for more clarity is almost always a good thing.
The new hire knows that there are a group of people whose assignment is to answer their questions.
Having worked someplace where that wasn't the case, and where one might be told, "wow, you really should read the policy about x" in public on Slack (despite the fact one had read it and didn't feel pushing back in public was appropriate), one learns to stop asking questions in public because a) management does nothing after the fact, b) doesn't seem to know or care better, c) is the offending party, or d) all of the above.
Just sayin' - it happens, but if you have a healthy culture, that surely can be awesome.
Where do you work if you don't mind the question?
'Mr Herapath, I understand that you wish to visit the whaler, and you have my permission to go. You are no doubt aware that there is a great deal of ill-feeling between the United States and England, and that most unhappily the Leopard was the cause of some of it: that is why I thought best to forbid the usual ship-visiting, to prevent quarrelling of any kind. You also know the Leopard's condition: one day's use of a forge and the proper tools would enable her to put to sea rather than winter here. The whaler certainly possesses a forge, but as a gentleman you will understand that I am extremely reluctant to ask a favour of the American skipper, extremely reluctant to expose the service or myself to a rebuff. I may add that he is equally reluctant to come a-begging to me, and I honour him for it. However, on reflection he may feel inclined to exchange the use of his forge for our medical services. You may give him a view of the situation, but without committing us to any specific request - harkee, Mr Herapath, don't you expose us to an affront, whatever you do. And if it should turn out that he would like the exchange, why, I should be very much obliged to you. Very much obliged indeed, for I should be even more reluctant to use force.'
That seems like a major factor - there's the classic example of the IT person who's constantly being asked to help with relatively basic tasks. If that's their defined job, that's not a problem - but if they have other responsibilities that are not being met due to constant requests for assistance, it becomes a problem.
A similar example is found in areas with a high concentration of homeless people - i.e. if there is just one homeless person in a neighborhood, people might go out of their way to be helpful, or if they were asking for money people might be willing to give them a few dollars - but if there are 100 homeless people in a neighborhood, then treating them all equally would mean shelling out several hundred dollars, a more significant burden.
Once a problem becomes organizational-scale or societal-scale, then this focus on individual relationships no longer makes much sense. In the former case, hiring a person (or team) whose sole job is to provide technical assitance is the solution; in the latter, some kind of social safety net aimed at keeping people off the street is needed.
At a certain scale the issue requires a altruistic leader to marshal the forces to combat the societal problem, and while there are many qualified people for just such a task, the task of finding such a person, appointing them with the appropriate authority, and then giving them the the tools and resources they need to succeed are themselves tasks that require long unbroken chains of altruism to succeed, even though on a 1:1 ratio the problem is the exact same proportion.
1. Debt aversion: Not wanting to repay the favor
2. Shame or embarrassment: asking reveals need, dependence, or lack of ability
3. Not wanting to impose
Even when there's a 90% chance of being accepted, the expected value could be negative
Many companies have a policy to give a discount, upgrade or similar if customer asks nicely for it. But somehow majority of people are just rude and they want discount because “your hotel is shitty, too expensive service, etc.” (put some lie or insult). There is no “thank you”. No “please”
So people will demand but not ask..
When people ask my business for a discount I always offer one to people who ask nicely.
Asking nicely requires a relatively positive emotional state. Demanding a discount due to a perceived slight, doesn’t.
In my experience, it’s a lot easier for someone to stay or go into a negative place than a positive one.
If someone is in a customer service role, they’ll deal a lot with the other part of the population who isn’t (today) in that group, and they’re very memorable.
Folks are not usually doing the opposite because they are intentionally being ineffective. It's a matter of either lack of knowledge or experience on how to do better, or more commonly, inability to manage themselves to a better state in their environment, and an environment that doesn't direct them to being in a better state either. It can be very difficult to do. Some people can't do it even in the most ideal of environments.
So kudos for managing yourself to be in a good place in a harsh environment, or good fortune for being in an environment that directs you in a good direction - or likely a combination of both to various degrees. Either way, sounds like a plus for folks you interact with.
1. Help people without expecting to be repaid for it in any form
2. Practice empathy for shortcomings of others
3. Speak up if you don't want to or are not able to help someone
Some reflection on them tends to be informative about many of the challenges on both sides, and the nature of the problem.
Some of them include shelters with:
- No dog rules (because many people have dogs which are poorly behaved, lack immunizations, and have attacked other people at the shelters in the past). Many folks have animals for companionship and protection.
- No drug rules, including Alcohol (because many people have gone on drug fueled benders and attacked others at the shelters in the last). Many persistent homeless folks have drug problems too.
- Sex segregation rules (because women have been raped by others at the shelter in the past). The problem is, many homeless women also have boyfriends that provide a significant degree of safety and support, and even with sex segregation, the shelters have predators.
But what else are they supposed to do?
If they don’t make rules to at least protect others in the environment, they’re making a giant attractive nuisance/hazard. If they make exceptions, they’re asking to be attacked or sued themselves. (You’d be surprised how many activists are happy to spend serious money suing over something like that).
They also sounds like a recipe for being taken advantage of or abused in an Urban environment, or if applied naively.
In my experience, do it long enough, and blindly enough, and it’ll end up collecting the worst - in any environment it’s applied to - when the group set is large.
Mostly because of a filtering effect. The folks who need help to get self sufficient will use the help, get self sufficient, then go elsewhere.
The folks who will fall back on bad habits, will use the help, and break themselves again, and then get into a cycle of dependence on the help until either the help is withdrawn (which often causes anger), or they find an even juicier offer of help.
It isn’t a large percentage of people who are like the latter group - maybe 1-2%. But given enough folks and enough time, and it’ll end up collecting a hard core group of people that will be a serious problem.
Also, one wonders why so many big charity donors are anonymous.
Not only asking, but giving is a potentially sensitive act that sometimes (perhaps from modesty) demands discretion/anonymity.
When giving money to a homeless person I notice I'll prefer to do it when nobody is looking, and move on quickly, avoiding too much of a "thank-you".
It's not just that act has to be "Kantian".
There's definitely something about giving that carries the same barrier, and it's remedied by anonymity. I'll put cash money in a charity box, but would never use an identifiable card/digital method.
Charities ought to know this if they're wise. that the "cash-less" society is the death sentence for them.
Sometime in the early 2000s the most of British charity was transformed (dragged through the mud) by corporate whackjobs, PR gurus, and Feng Shui design soothsayers to align their ley-lines and whatnot.
Charity shops stopped having any actual bargains in them, and the money boxes we used to enjoy putting spare change into vanished.
They made up all kinds of bizarre, frankly unbelievable stories about how the staff "weren't trained to handle cash" and that robbers would steal their charity tins (in broad daylight outside Waterloo station under 200 CCTV cameras... like Jimmy Reckon!)
Then all those charity scandals about abuse and corruption came out.
Heartbreaking what a few clueless, vicious vandals and scumbags in suits can do to brand reputations earned over centuries.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/secret...
This is a much bigger issue than people realise in our technological society.
Once, interaction with any doctor would be considered confidential. Today surveillance capitalism and so-called "big data" creates a new problem for everyone, young or old, male or female.
We've long known that many men "die of embarrassment", because they won't go to the doctor. Pride/shame aside, that now affects everyone. People stop reporting symptoms because they don't want the stigma or economic penalty resulting from data being "shared" (increasingly without consent for "research" etc) - potentially to employers, insurance companies, and various gatekeepers popping up in the digital world.
It's ironic at many levels.
The information age should give us better health through ease of communication and access to data. However, the research benefits to the many that accrue from big-data are a burden upon the few/individuals. Searching on Google for medical ailments is a sure way to let the advertising world know all about your health complaints, real or imagined, and invite spam, inappropriate and intrusive insinuations. And, as we know recently, for women seeking abortions it can lead to violence or imprisonment.
So there is an odd communistic utilitarianism at play that defeats the very benefits our technologies should bring.
The reason medical data sharing is risky is because _if_ it does leak, it can cause large stigma and economical damage. But I am not aware of any big-data related cases where that did happen. The legal protections (imperfect as they are) have either worked, or have caused the people who abuse them to hide their tracks.
That's a strong claim.
It took me 10 second to find these 4 stories of leaks of up to 45 million records and many written accounts of distress, lost jobs and broken relationships as consequences.
https://news.trendmicro.com/2021/07/28/biggest-health-sector...
https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/medical-data-leak...
https://securereading.com/medical-data-leak-database-of-huma...
https://americanretrieval.com/medical-records-breach/
But as my sibling poster says too, your unevidenced doubts are neither here nor there, because it's the (equally unevidenced with respect to specifics) doubts of ordinary people that matter.
And let's be honest, that mistrust is justified in a time where data leaks and abuse is rampant.
Medical professionals and researchers may all be saints, but their halos are only as bright as the company they keep... Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon... and other big-tech cloud infrastructure on which sensitive data systems are built.
Of course it's a tragedy. Somewhere in that data are cures and remedies. But we can't have nice things if some are allowed to crap in the punch-bowl and drive the guests out of the party.
And they have all kinds of stories these guys, dude I love talking to Jonathan Ramos here, dude way better than all therapists I've ever spoken to in my whole life combined. He told me "obviously you got tortured, look at the things you say, you lay out the truth for people clearly!" No picólogo could have ever said that! Dude categorically superior to every professional therapist! And that cost 4 dollars!
a) Stranger. It is unlikely you will see this person again. It doesn't hurt to ask but don't expect much. We may shy away from asking as they appear rude/busy/angry.
b) Acquaintance. This is a coworker or someone in the neighborhood. We don't want to hurt the relationship. We occasionally ask for small favors and in an emergency we may ask for a big favor. We are tactful in asking for what we want. We reciprocate any favors.
c) Family. This is your best friend or your significant other who may be closer than your blood relatives. We trust them implicitly and will always believe they can never be wrong. We ask a lot of them but are aware of their own struggles and wait for the appropriate time. We are shameless in asking for what we want.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/askers-....
> “While quite young,... Vronsky had experienced the humiliation of a refusal when, having got into debt, he had tried to borrow money, and since then he had never again allowed himself to get into such a position.” (L. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina)
Self-sufficiency has some downsides and inefficiencies but so does its opposite. A better paper would explore that side also, and the balance.
I think it has to do with most devices low DPI as these latex documents historically are made for printing most of all.
I like to save these PDFs in iBooks on my mac and get back to reading them comfortably on my iPad. Works great imho.
CM was designed in the late 70s - early 80s. High resolution raster displays were an exotic item at that time. CM was meant to be used for printing documents on the printers of the era, that suffered from considerable ink bleeding.
See the pictures in [1] to see the difference between how the font looks on screen and when printed on the "right" equipment.
[1] https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-computer-m...
⸻
1. Not really in the same sense as ink bleed, in which the ink spreads from where it is applied, but more just that the pixels created by the charge were slightly larger than the specified resolution.
Of the two, ego is the biggest problem, I would say, and the first one that needs to be addressed. The typical reason someone might not want to ask a question is because they are afraid people will think they're stupid because asking reveals you don't know something that you believe is expected you should know. If this something is something you should know, then are you perhaps pretending to be better than you are? Are you trying to prevent people from forming an accurate opinion of you, an opinion that you deserve?
With respect to the second problem, people attach way too much value to what others say or might think instead of the truth. We all think things about each other. So what? Life is a bazaar of ignorant and cranky people assessing, misassessing, yammering, squabbling, haggling, making noise, elbowing each other, and so on, not some preciously arranged crystal palace or the last judgement presided over by a capricious teenager. No one is thinking about you because they're too busy thinking about themselves...just like you're doing by worrying so much about what others think of you.
There are ultimately two possibilities. Someone's assessment of you is accurate or it is inaccurate. If it is accurate, then what's the problem? You deserve it. If it is inaccurate, then it doesn't matter because it isn't true. In either case, if you are treated unjustly, or even uncharitably, then who's the asshole? Not you. As Marcus Aurelius would say, as long as you're going the right thing, you have nothing to worry about. You've done your part. You have no control over anything else, so why worry about it? If you don't ask the question, then perhaps no one will think you're stupid, but you will have failed to done your part by choosing to remain ignorant when all you had to do is ask. You would be guilty of what Catholics call "human respect".