And while is has some good points, specifically that people should put in effort to finding out the answer before asking for help, certain people don't help others because they feel the person pursuing help has not done their due investigation and work. (in this case, they should simply not respond. Why they do respond is a mystery to me) As I read through all of the comments, most of them simply praising the author for his stance on the subject, there were a few posts that countered this. First of all, the author fails to even acknowledge the whole "lead by example" method of teaching. Many people including myself do investigations, trial and error, AND want to find other examples of somewhat aligned solutions. I often come to these forums trying to find or request reference code.
Here are some of the other counter points made by a few people, willing to post against the majority:
Of course they’re going to ask for the answer because why would you reinvent the wheel if it’s already been done?
If you have some simple inane question posed to a just-grad you really think they’re going to research how to embed pix? NO they’re going to work smart not hard. If it hasn’t been done or if they can’t find an answer quickly online they’ll probably try to figure it out eventually, but look at it this way.
When you boss asks you to complete a task do you complete it quickly or start from the beginning even though someone already has an idea of how it should be done?
If you said the latter you should probably be fired for wasting the company’s fucking time.
If i had an emp. who tried to do everything from scratch and didn’t bother to find a quick pre=fab answer online they would be canned.
"What a retard. Anyone with a slight hint of intelligence knows that the very best software engineers are adept at integrating the work of others…a programmer who’s first instinct is to find the best wheel for the job already invented by someone else rather than create their own sub-standard solution are always the most successful."
While I generally agree with the topic, people should put in a good effort to figure out a problem before looking for help, I think some people use this concept as a scape goat. "You aren't putting in enough effort, so I'll just toss out some random statements and links and not help you".There are those of us who learn better by example. I can learn much more much faster by dissecting a good code example than I can by spending the same time researching an issue.
That said, I still conform to some of the rules Matt laid out. I spend some amount of time looking into the issue before I would flat out ask for the answer. I have enough confidence in my ability to find a solution to a problem that if I don’t find it in a reasonable amount of time, then I figure it’s an obscure or difficult thing to do.
But from the perspective of the one answering the question, they have no idea what process has brought the questioner to this point. Thus the title of the article, “What have you tried?”
