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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

There's a pretty big difference between asking co-workers and asking on a public mailing list or chat room.

It's completely reasonable, even expected, to ask your co-workers dumb questions when you get stuck. If they can tell you in ten seconds and it would take you five minutes (and you're not interrupting them in the middle of something) then why not ask? It's a more efficient use of your team's time.

But on a public forum, where you're talking to people who are volunteering your time, and you get a wider audience, it's a different story. Asking before you've done all your homework is abusing the time of the other people, both because they give that time freely, and because using 10 seconds each from 50 different people is more than using 5 minutes of your own time. Here, if you don't have the time or motivation to sit down and work through the question properly, wait to ask it until you do.

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You know, I used to be subscribed to a technical mailing list, around the time that .NET first came out. One guy started abusing the mailing list like mad. Asking extremely simple questions that he could have answered with a brief skim of the published documentation, or a web search.

After awhile, people started to berate him for this behavior. He apologized, but kept doing it. He kept getting answers, and kept learning.

Last I heard, he'd gone on to be a team lead, then run his own, successful company. He didn't let fear of public annoyance or seeming stupid hinder his own progress.

I'm not saying everyone should gleefully annoy others, but I've met far, far too many technical people who spend more time on their anxiety than they spend on actually learning and doing. You have to find a balance, and obsessing over the theoretical time expended across a group of people is probably not productive.

And that's the difference between management and us worker bees!

I won't deny that selfishness and abuse can work. That doesn't mean it's a good thing, or that I'll encourage it in any way.

If you're doing things right then there won't be any anxiety when asking your question in public, because you'll have done all you can on your own and be in a position to ask intelligently. If you're abusing other people's time because you can't be arsed to put in effort on your own, you should feel anxious about it.

you'll have done all you can on your own

But you'll never reach that point.

If you're abusing other people's time because you can't be arsed to put in effort on your own, you should feel anxious about it.

Why? What's the better thing they have to spend time on, and why aren't they already spending time there? You're talking about people who spend time on some forum because that is, essentially, a hobby for them. You're not "wasting" someone's time when their time has no particular value in the first place.

People who offer free help typically do so because they like to work on interesting problems, not act as an intermediary between a lazy programmer and the documentation.

You're assuming that all kinds of help are equal in the eyes of someone who practices this "hobby," and that's simply not true. It's basically the equivalent of, "You just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not come cook me a meal in my mansion instead?"

People who offer free help typically do so because they like to work on interesting problems

That's pure conjecture on your part. I rarely see newbies asking for help on interesting problems, yet I see plenty of people willing to answer their questions.

It's basically the equivalent of, "You just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not come cook me a meal in my mansion instead?"

No it isn't. It's the equivalent of, "you just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not allow me to come to the soup kitchen as well?"

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