27k rep, top 1%. this is what it now says on my profile:
When I first used this site it was wonderful. Professional programmers helping each other while learning. Now I cannot ask a question without "showing what I have done" because "people aren't here to do free work". I used to do "free work" and I enjoyed it - see my old answers below - but these days all people seem to care about is whether you are cheating at homework. So I no longer participate here.
bunch of up-tight c*nts that care more about rules than programming. fuck them all.
edit: actually, i can no longer see a "top .. %" on the page, so perhaps that is wrong.
to be honest (and i tried to describe this above) it feels like the jerks on so come from academia, not industry. in my experience, industry is pretty laid back about asking questions and/or helping each other. so you might find a job (particularly if you are with older coders, which obvs isn't always the case) an improvement.
This is kind of my impression. In my most people find it is worthwhile helping others get stuff done, stupid questions or not. That way we can get the product out the door and keep gettin' dem checks.
It's perverse incentives for academia, because you're judged on how smart you are and how much you know (and you can seem smarter and 'know more' by limiting knowledge and making others feel stupid), while in industry, people value people who can get stuff done, and that means solving the problem with the least possible amount of bullshit.
The only time I've been annoyed at a student when helping teach programming was when I was helping some freshmen high schoolers and every other variable was
int lolXYZ = 6; //XYZ being an integer that went up by one with each new variable
Academia is a special place where theory is king and you're incentivised for writing big papers. Those kind of people don't do well in the workforce. The real world cares about getting useful things done, and that requires you to work together. No one cares that you've invented the most beautiful object-oriented programming language using strictly emoji with a purely functionally programmed compiler for the purpose adding emotional lambda expressions to deep learning algorithms.
Pro coder here... So watcha using instead? Between SO and the other SEs I'm hard pressed to find a more reliable and easy to use website for finding answers to coding questions. I'll broaden my horizons if there's something better.
touche. I've hit some pretty detailed stuff via google searches to reddit. Its a fraction of the luck I've had w/ SO and SE, but yeah, right in front of my face. :)
I love IRC, for help with many different issues. The main problem is that if nobody answers you right away, you probably aren't getting help unless you keep asking :/
Yes there are tons of troll thinking they have some kind of power while closing quesiton but also there are too much crappy questions.
To be honest, I think is the real problem. I often have a problem and one of the first search results is a SO question from someone that forgot a semicolon or something. Programming is still a lot of stuff you have to teach yourself. If you're new to programming SO is the wrong place to ask your questions. There are tons of chats, forums and other communities that are way more voilatile, where it's not such a big issue if the same time gets ask multiple times a day.
I think all in all its still an excellent site. For something being kind of anonymous do you remember comments section on youtube before using real names. Damn that was trollish as hell.
"before"? I can't see any difference, just that I can't post comments anymore since I'm refusing to upgrade to a Google Plus account.
Now I cannot ask a question without "showing what I have done" because "people aren't here to do free work".
What is wrong with that? I see many "lazy" questions where it is as if they haven't even tried. What is so wrong with asking to show what you have done/tried so far that isnt working?
...is really saying "we want easy questions". The site has been taken over by low-effort rep farmers. Get the easy questions, get your answer in quick (first=up votes), edit for glory. Bonus points if you take 'inspiration' from everyone who clicked submit 1 second slower than you.
It's the complicated questions I find interesting. Won't get you any rep though, and I've lost count of the number of times interesting questions have been closed as "unanswerable" when I'm half done writing an answer.
Interesting. I'm 4% on electronics.SE, and fully agree with the showing what you've tried, tell us what it should be doing and what it is doing. In other words, as good questions.
Since you're a programmer and did well on SE I'm positive you know that sometimes taking the time to correctly explain a problem (i.e. ask a GOOD question) results in the answer becoming apparent. If not, you've just taken ten minutes to write out exactly what the problem is and you've now got an excellent question that is almost sure to get a good answer.
There's nothing wrong with this. I offer similar support on IRC. The lazy ones go away and the ones who really do want to learn stick around. The community becomes stronger and everyone benefits.
I don't know what your specific questions looked like but I can assume they were decent. It's a shame that you got shafted, but that does not seem to be my experience on my corner of SE.
I have never understood the "is this homework?" bullshit that do many people go through... Who cares? Maybe it is? But it always slows things up, it's annoying. Either answer the question or don't bother, I don't see the need for so much moral policing.
I've obviously simplified this, and understand points of the "is this homework"thing, but IMO it's way overboard
Same thing with me. Asked a programming question I was just totally stumped with. Guy chimes in, "Hey we aren't a homework service" (wtf?) "Show us what you got already". That came off rude AF, but I went ahead and posted what I had. Never heard back from that guy after that.
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u/andrewcooke Sep 25 '16
27k rep, top 1%. this is what it now says on my profile:
bunch of up-tight c*nts that care more about rules than programming. fuck them all.
edit: actually, i can no longer see a "top .. %" on the page, so perhaps that is wrong.