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That seems a bit unfair - I remember sitting in classes where the instructor explained the material, we had text books, but still some folks would ask for someone to explain what had been explained to them.
There will always be idiots who think that programming is a good job, and they should be able to do it well, and that if they can't, it is someone elses fault.
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Erudite_Eric wrote: Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle
and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the
large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves.
First because there were very few resources.
Second because it was often difficult to access those resources.
Third there were far fewer people doing it.
Erudite_Eric wrote: It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at
CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking
out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know
the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself.
Based on that argument every doctor would learn solely by reading books and experimenting.
The reason people didn't use resources long ago was because they didn't exist long ago. The reason that they use them now is because they exist now.
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jschell wrote: Based on that argument every doctor would learn solely by reading books and
experimenting.
Call me old fashioned but I wouldn't wanted to be treated by a doctor that got his answers off of WebMD or other Medical BBS. Who knows what quality of answer they'd get there.
Nope, I want doctors taught by experienced professors in University Medical Schools, preferably ones attached to real hospitals so the students can do "rounds" with actual doctors. That's how they learn.
That's the analagous discussion to what's here. Would you hire a programmer who said "I learned everything I know from Code Project"? I wouldn't. Have I picked up things here or learned something I didn't know, sure I have. But CP is the *last* place I come to, not the first.
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Chuck O'Toole wrote: But CP is the *last* place I come to, not the first
Amen!
Why is common sense not common?
Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level where they are an expert.
Sometimes it takes a lot of work to be lazy
Please stand in front of my pistol, smile and wait for the flash - JSOP 2012
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Many hobbyists are more skilled and/or knowledgeable in what they do than professionals.
Why? The hobbyist always loves what he does. The professional loved it once, but now it's just a job that gets bread on the table.
Of course there's many great professionals too, but I wouldn't trust a professional more than I would trust a fanatic hobbyist.
I learned almost everything I know from CP and I spent last saturday fixing code from a Microsoft Certified *insert some titles here*.
And it isn't the first time I fixed her code either.
It's an OO world.
public class Naerling : Lazy<Person>{
public void DoWork(){ throw new NotImplementedException(); }
}
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If a doctor posted an 'urgentz pls' post I would go find another doctor.
Actually what they use is a vast library of books and material to check symptoms causes and cures.
What we did in our day was use books too, and work it out ourselves by trying things out.
It seems that experimentation today is dead.
==============================
Nothing to say.
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Erudite_Eric wrote: Actually what they use is a vast library of books and material to check symptoms
causes and cures.
Well, not really! I have done and still do a lot of programming, but my 'day job' was (I am retired) as an Anesthesiologist and Intensivist, and I was generally reckoned a pretty good one. In my speciality, you may have time to research problems you anticipate, but you frequently don't have time to research the unexpected ones, which are often more challenging. The skill comes in being able to anticipate more than 'the average bear' and particularly in rapidly extracting from your prior experiences and/or previous reading/learning the material that is most relevant to the current problem. In less acute specialities, there is more time to think, but putting the gestalt of the patient's presentation (not just signs and symptoms, but also past history and personal circumstances) together into a picture that leads to diagnosis and treatment involves much more than "checking symptoms causes and cures" in "a vast library". Medicine is still at least 40% Art.
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This is same "problem" that computation has, CS courses teach you something, but you have to develop your art alone, by coding a great massive number of hours. Like a pilot or a doctor who have seen much in his life. Computation is not enginnering, its 50% enginering and 50% art.
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Touchè
I was just thinking last night that I miss the days of UseNet. One learned fairly quickly from some really brutal responses what was and was not acceptable. Moreover, flame-wars and grilling the truly inept were seen as sport. But now, since we all have to play nicely the standard has stooped to that of the lowliest competitor - bring back the days of measure-up or be chewed-up and spat-out!
The sum total of the documentation/help I had available when starting out were: The help file for Turbo Pascal 6.0, the help file for Borland c++ 3.1 and (the one I spent most time with) the commented output of Sourer, a dissasembler whose serial number I still recall now some 19 years after first getting it B309868-YTHT
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Yeah.
When I was learning on the job you couldnt go ask a senior guy a question unless you had it formed really well, had investigated all the angles and really come to the crux of the problem. If not you would get chewed up badly. As you should be.
==============================
Nothing to say.
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Agree fully with this - it's kinda what I came here to say. WE have caused this problem by allowing it to continue, and even some people (Stack Overflow) are making money off this problem. On Stack Overflow, you can't say "dumb question, moron, RTFM" as it's against the community guidelines for what's acceptable. So, they've made it a rule that you have to be an idiot to ask a question on the site.
The problem comes when you have a real question that you really need the help of the community. I have several unanswered questions on Stack Overflow because of that. It's not a site where you can ask the hard questions, and if you do, you're ignored because it's not easy to "get points" by providing a thoughtful answer, it requires work, and when you can get points on the site by doing Google searches on behalf of other users, there isn't much motivation for people to want to improve themselves by exploring the difficult stuff.
We need to be able to say "FGI" to people and CLOSE the question when it's stupid. AND, we, as a community, should let the idiots flounder. When someone asks a dumb question and you help them, you are perpetuating the problem. If we can't flame them, we could at least IGNORE them. Please.
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In Quick Answers you have the ability to close questions where the poster has made no attempt to allow others to help them. This feature will be added to the discussion forums.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Well on one hand, the group of people here are very helpful, and I consider you all to be the old school guard, the last remaining source of quality help left for this subject.
Getting quality help is so hard now days, because there are very few people left that are willing to spend some time giving back to the community. I know there are thousands of well qualified coders in this country, but I have no clue what they do with their spare time. I'm always searching for programmers here where I live, but I can't really find any.
On the other hand, there are thousands of entry level programmers here where I live, and even more worldwide online jam packing other forums to the point of saturation. About 10% of the decent questions get answered, and the other 90% just sit there and fade away, because the question makes no sense.
I suspect it boils down to economics, in which they sold a program really cheap, and are not able to deliver a working prototype to get paid. So they get hostile and start making extreme demands. I see that spilling over to CJ now on the Web Development forum, and suspect it may get worst.
I know one day in the future, there won't be enough masters left to teach the students, because demand for programs now it at an all time high.
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Erudite_Eric wrote: work out for themselves
I am sensing a touch of frustration.....
Why is common sense not common?
Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level where they are an expert.
Sometimes it takes a lot of work to be lazy
Please stand in front of my pistol, smile and wait for the flash - JSOP 2012
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It's a human condition! People are inherently lazy and when encountering an obstacle, will naturally tend towards the easiest way out.
No one knows the things of a man except the spirit of that man; likewise no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God whom we have received. He who is joined to the Lord, is ONE Spirit with him(Jesus) - 1Cor 2:10-16 & 6:17
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zaphnath wrote: People are inherently lazy and when encountering an obstacle, will naturally tend towards the easiest way out.
Just like water and electricity.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
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Yes, things become extremely interesting when water takes the easiest way and then itself becomes the easiest way for the electricity.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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Generally that may be so, but those people appear more like mountain climbers who discover that they are not fit enough at the foot of the mountain and then look for somebody to carry them to the peak. What's the point? Does it make them fitter or more experienced climbers? Where is the accomplishment?
Laziness can only get unliked chores out of the way. This raises the question why all those people work on things they are not interested in and obviously have no ambition to put any work into. As far as I know there is nobody forcing them to do this at gunpoint.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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CDP1802 wrote: Where is the accomplishment?
Exactly!
CDP1802 wrote: This raises the question why all those people work on things they are not interested in and obviously have no ambition to put any work into.
This seems to be the rule rather than the exception, and not just in our industry. When I was a teenager flipping burgers, my peers would complain about not having any money to go out, buy this, do that, etc. But when they clocked in for their shift, they then started complaining about having to work. Heaven forbid they get asked to work both Friday and Saturday night!  As an aside, while my burgers and hot dogs took a bit longer to get out, they actually resembled the ones you would see on posters and tv commercials. I was proud of that.
I hear much the same from adults today. My father-in-law used to call them clock watchers. As soon as they get to work, they're counting down the hours until quitting time. When Monday morning rolls around, they're already wanting Friday to get here so they can take a break. I realize not everyone is like this, and some folks may not be able to change jobs, but for those that are going through the motions just to get a paycheck... 
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
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CDP1802 wrote: Generally that may be so, but those people appear more like mountain climbers
who discover that they are not fit enough at the foot of the mountain and then
look for somebody to carry them to the peak. What's the point? Does it make them
fitter or more experienced climbers? Where is the accomplishment?
Your analogy...
There are in fact many people at the bottom of that mountain that...
- Really want to do it themselves.
- Want to do it the 'correct' way
- Accept the challenge
- Accept that they must spend time learning.
And despite that have no idea how to actually get started and certainly have no idea what/how to ask questions. And some do not even understand what a "mountain" is.
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My problem with these people is not that they don't know about linked lists or writing data to a file, but that they don't have the decency to write a decent question.
Tagging a question with 'C#', 'VB' and 'SQL' and asking "How do I file write to file on computer?", usually in the topic with sometimes an empty body... Or something like "How write file? Plz help!"
I'm willing to answer ANY question (I have the answer to) as long as that question is well formulated, clear and to the point.
By the way, why put this in the C / C++ / MFC forum? People of any language ask 'stupid' questions like that 
It's an OO world.
public class Naerling : Lazy<Person>{
public void DoWork(){ throw new NotImplementedException(); }
}
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Yeah, and you could get a really big one for a nickel, too. But perhaps I should stay on point.
About eight years ago, it was my duty to assist a young graduate student, who had an "intern" position with my employer, in getting to work and back each day. One day while we were in transit, this intern, whom we shall call Miss Smith, stunned me by saying with no trace of embarrassment that she never could understand the difference between disk storage and RAM, or why it was important.
Yes, you read that right. I'll wait while you unswallow your tongues.
Mind you, Miss Smith was quite intelligent, on the verge of receiving a Master's degree in Computer Science. She was near to completing a major, much needed transformation of our employer's extensive documentation database. But her education in Computer Science had exposed her only to interpretive tools such as Visual Basic, Access, and Excel. She had never had to run a compiler or linkage editor. She had never had to debug a program interactively. She didn't know what "assembly language" is. In short, she had never had to grapple with the physical reality underneath the virtual world maintained by her interpretive tools.
Yet Miss Smith's skills with those tools were considerable and quite valuable. I have no doubt that she received her Master's degree, and went on to become someone's well-paid employee, on the strength of what she knew.
At the time of the conversation mentioned above, I went into a great, gesture-filled, loathsomely detailed presentation on the differences between RAM and offline storage, why each was necessary and neither was sufficient, and what the divergence between the two could mean according to circumstances. It took the whole of an hour's ride, and I wasn't nearly finished when Miss Smith wished me a good evening, stepped gracefully out of my car, and fled screaming in terror for her dorm room. To this day, I can't be sure that she grasped any fraction of what I said...or, in all candor, whether it would have mattered if she hadn't.
It was possible for Miss Smith to get by without the knowledge under discussion because the tools with which she worked made it unnecessary. Whether it will ever become necessary is questionable; indeed, it becomes less and less likely as time passes and developers' tools increase further in power.
Now, what was that about linked lists?
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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The young lady was far ahead of you 
Look at the details of virtual memory and paging. With a little imagination you can see that we actually could do without a traditional file system by placing everything into one huge virtual memory space. Data would be swapped between the disk and the memory as needed automatically. It would be different to what we are used to, but we would never have to deal with file systems again.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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(chuckle) Far enough, I suppose. Still, there's something chilling about a "Computer Science" major unaware of the functions of the computer's various components:
- She'd never heard of the CPU registers;
- She'd never been introduced to the concept of virtual memory;
- She had no idea that her whole development world was virtual;
- "Communications protocol? What's that?"
- "You mean there's more than one?"
Among the classical-era Greeks, physicians proposed a model of the human body as "a bag of blood," with organs floating in it here and there. Miss Smith's model of the computer was comparable...except that the organs were something of a mystery to her. She probably wished they'd "go away"...at least, after she'd escaped my tutelage.
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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Our intern's favorite word used to be 'nowadays', especially when telling me about those oldschool thinges we 'nowadays' don't have to waste any thought about anymore. He already has begun to change his tune since he started writing some code for a 'weak' 1 GHz dual core ARM processor, but the young Padawan still has a lot to learn
Seriously, this is the stuff they are taught and they don't have any choice but to believe it. I remember well how the Professor started with 'Nowadays (!) the compilers are better than the average assembly programmer' when I still sat at the school bench. He thought I was a bit arrogant when I told him that I usually don't aim for the average. He did not know that I had about 12 years experience in assembly programming at that time. Anyway, I can see how you can get a degree in computer science by specializing on the more abstract stuff.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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