May 3, 2025 at 1:22 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Just Answer the Question!
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
May 3, 2025 at 7:47 am
Hey Grant - as time passed away…I did noticed: I’m an old guy too (not to mention I feel myself as my studies finished on yersterday 😄) and I have to say: Really great editorial!
It could be written by myself and there are a lot of folks out there too thinking the same like you and me - cool example the amateur radio stuff thing… 👍
…or in my own words: AI is great or at least could become great…and/or dangerous. But we humans are even greater on helping each other - the thing with „…a page ahead…“
Thank you for your post..so much!
Greetings to you and all out there!
Holger
May 3, 2025 at 12:04 pm
Cheers Holger! Appreciate it.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
May 4, 2025 at 1:28 pm
I agree totally. In lots of other forums I am a member of I see those 'gatekeepers'. They think it's their job to humiliate the unknowing. They reprimand with "asked and answered multiple times - did you do a search of this group?" In my opinion, help or scroll. Those are your two options.
ewm2
May 4, 2025 at 2:15 pm
I agree totally. In lots of other forums I am a member of I see those 'gatekeepers'. They think it's their job to humiliate the unknowing. They reprimand with "asked and answered multiple times - did you do a search of this group?" In my opinion, help or scroll. Those are your two options.
I could not agree more. Help or scroll.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
May 4, 2025 at 2:28 pm
Hey Grant, thank you for your post on this topic. It touches upon a wound for me which still hurts. About 8 years ago I was assigned to be my agency's TFS Administrator, as the previous TFS Admin was leaving. He gave me some quick instructions, along with notes on how he had configured TFS, then he was gone. I work for a large state government's health department. So, sometimes people's health and even lives depend upon us. For reasons I've never understood, we don't have a lot of money, even though we're one of the largest state departments in my state and other state departments seem to have more than enough. The important thing here is there is no money to send anyone to training or conferences, ever. And just knowing what servers the TFS administration server, SQL Server, and build servers are located, isn't the same as knowing how to add people to TFS or give them the necessary permissions, etc.
Naturally, at the time, I went to Stack Overflow (SO) to ask questions. This was the worst experiences I ever had asking questions online! There is one person on SO who is an expert at TFS but despises any beginner's question. I'll call this jerk Bill (not his real name). Bill would tell me in cryptic terms that my question was not welcome on SO, then he would vote my question down and turn off anyone from answering my question. Any question I asked. All the time, for years!!! The only TFS questions he would allow is the most esoteric. I told Bill that his antagonistic behavior was hurting other people, including potentially people's health, and delaying projects from going forward. None of that mattered to Bill. All he wanted to do was play God and SO gave him that opportunity. Unfortunately for everyone my employer still wouldn't pay for any training, so it took me years to learn what a course could have told me in a week, at the longest.
Anyway, SO is from my point of view, the worst community for asking questions, as their pattern allows people to be dictators over getting answers.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
May 5, 2025 at 1:24 pm
Dang, Rod. Sorry to hear about that. My own experiences on SO are mixed.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
May 6, 2025 at 9:50 am
Just to approach this from the other side: most people ask questions because they want to learn. But I've seen plenty of people who ask questions because they just want someone else to do their work for them.
From dumping a homework question without explaining where they're stuck, or even attempting to hide the fact that it's a homework assignment; to repeatedly asking essentially the same question over and over again, without making any effort to understand the answers provided; to progressively asking anyone who answers to write more and more of the code for them, until they've written the whole thing.
These tend to be the sort of people who will down-vote any answer that doesn't hand them perfect ready-made code that they can present as their own work. Who will demand "URGENT!!!1!" help from unpaid volunteers for every question they have. And who will rarely, if ever, thank anyone who tries to help them.
And these tend to be the people who complain most vocally when their eleventeenth unformatted homework question dump gets closed, or someone dares to ask them to explain what they've tried and where they're stuck.
So yes, help those who want to learn. But beware the "help vampire" who just wants to steal your time.
May 6, 2025 at 10:14 am
Hi Grant,
The gatekeeper-mentality in online fora can be a pain for newbies. I remember starting to learn usenet (technical fora mainly), but as a newcomer you often don't feel welcome.
Indeed that RTFM response was annoying, because the manual was sometimes 300 pages long.
The same happened on StackOverflow. I try to be friendly all the time to newbies, but if most are not, people will leave such platforms. Shame.
But that aside: I write this to mention an AI exception in the positive sense: phind.com
I don't know the first thing about radio-tech, but phind is GREAT at answering technical questions. And no sneaky prompt-adding and using ChatGPT as an actual backend.
Give it a try!
Regards,
Erwin Moller
PS: I am not affiliated with phind.com
May 6, 2025 at 1:57 pm
So yes, help those who want to learn. But beware the "help vampire" who just wants to steal your time.
Oh yeah, this is truth. 100%. And no arguments. I'd still, largely, just answer the first question. Second time I see it, yeah, probably going to scroll on by.3rd time, yeah, maybe point out that answers have already been provided. And some people are on my "do not engage" list.
My one exception is obvious school work. There I do deviate entirely from "Just answer the question." I don't know if that's bad or not, but, hey, none of us is perfect.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
May 6, 2025 at 1:59 pm
But that aside: I write this to mention an AI exception in the positive sense: phind.com
I don't know the first thing about radio-tech, but phind is GREAT at answering technical questions. And no sneaky prompt-adding and using ChatGPT as an actual backend.
New one for me. I'll check it out. Thanks.
I've been getting pretty good radio answers out of Perplexity using Claude (you can pick your engine with Perplexity). It's my go-to for a lot of tech.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
May 6, 2025 at 2:05 pm
Dang, Rod. Sorry to hear about that. My own experiences on SO are mixed.
Thank you, Grant. I've found that on SO, "Bill" is the only tyrant I've had to deal with and TFS is the only topic that Bill is tyrannical about. But, as a consequence of Bill behavior concerning TFS, I never ask any questions there about GitHub, where I am now one of our GitHub Administrators. The community forums on GitHub do not allow for such punitive behavior, like SO allows for.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
May 6, 2025 at 2:34 pm
My tendency on here (I'm not on a lot of forums to speak of) when I see what "feels like" a homework question or a "URGENT, need answer quick" question is to pass on by. I might go back and look if others have replied to see if my gut was right and the question was someone trying to get people to do their homework for them, or trying to answer interview questions and frequently? Yeah, it was (you can tell based on the interactions with the people who did reply.)
But I try to live by the "there are no stupid questions" mantra, because everyone has to start somewhere, not everyone has the same knowledge / experience and might not know something *I* find easy (and, they might find something I look at like a dog trying to figure out an airliners cockpit controls, easy.)
Gatekeeping / the "just RTFM" responses, though, are why I never delved deeply into Linux when it was getting popular back in the late 90s / early 2000s. Trying to figure out how to get a wireless NIC in a laptop to work in Linux and responses I was finding were "just RTFM," or "just recompile the kernel with the right drivers that you have to write yourself," or "get a different laptop" (like money grows on trees,) yeah, that was...
Off-putting...
May 7, 2025 at 8:38 pm
I wish we could easily avoid AI and go back to a search engine that understands Boolean operators. I have never had CoPilot provide a code sample that worked as is in the context (Azure SQL Database) I specified in my prompt. Literally never.
As an "old" who has been asking questions since 1983 in CompuServe Forums and Internet Newsgroups as I've moved from technology to technology, I agree with everything I've seen said here. An additional reason people ask questions about SQL Server in particular is that there are 15-year-old posts that are still excellent references, and some that have become worse than useless since at least 2012, yet have never been scrubbed. If you haven't learned who the experts are (who generally do update or scrub their old posts), it is hard to tell the difference. One problem with AI is that it usually can't tell the difference either.
I moved from Oracle developer to SQL Server DBA over a decade ago, and owe my career success to about a half-dozen websites (this being one and SO/SE being another) and about a dozen bloggers (including Grant, of course). With Oracle (8i-10g), there was a single source for getting a question answered -- an Oracle VP with a queue that was years long. I believe the relative market success of SQL Server is due to this community that so generously answers questions from those who are new. Everybody has to start sometime, and we need to be kind and helpful to those new to our ranks if we want the platform to continue to succeed and be improved.
May 7, 2025 at 9:43 pm
Thanks for the feedback. Not much to argue with. I have had better luck with Perplexity and Claude than with CoPilot and whatever engine it's running. But, I do get good answers out of AIs.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
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