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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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I started basically with these tools that her used. But i walked down because of curiosity. I wanted more and always knowed that these tools hiddened things from me, and wanted to know what they are. In reality, i wanted to make my own visual basic. Six years latter i am finishing my graduation. Now i can make my own compiler if i need, i use garbage collectors, but i understand the problems that can arise, like cache invalidation and memory fragmentation.
The conclusion is that these tools are valuable and produce healthy to enterprises and people, even by hiding the internals, or because of it. I dont know how my cars works, but this is not a problem if someone else has the knowledge.
There will always be these that like the innerworkings of the things and will go futher down. They can be scarse and the projection is to only increase, but they will exist. Good for who have the knowledge.
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Perhaps this a case of "preservation bias"?
Today any reasonably smart person with an "average" problem can find answers by themselves (by searching web forums, online books, Wikipedia, etc). Therefore there's a world of questions that get answered without ever being registered (e.g. by being posted to a forum).
With the middle ground all but covered, questions will virtually always come up from the extremes:
1. Very difficult and/or novel questions from very smart people, who did look for references but couldn't find any;
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.
The state of mankind being what it is, it's not hard to figure that type 2 questions will come up much more often than type 1.
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The problem with type 1 is that those questions usually involve a specific scenario which most potential repliers have never encountered. The best you can hope for then is that somebody actually gives the question some real thought and comes up with something.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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Sure, but if all we ever got were questions of the type "wow, I've never thought of that, let me hack on it a bit", then Eric would be a lot less exasperated about what he sees on the forums.
My point is, the reason we see so many dumb-ass questions these days (my hypothesis goes) is not because people in general have become dumber, but because reasonably smart people get answers to their reasonably difficult questions by looking them up on the web, so we're left with the lazy-asses who couldn't even bother to Google the damn thing, plus the occasional bright mind with an actually novel question.
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And I don't think that you are far from the truth with it. I guess that there will always be those who think that the grey mass in their heads is only there to keep the ears apart.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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Definitely.
1) Find it on Google (with multiple well-worded searches)
2) Ask someone on a programming chatroom.
3) Then move to a forum.
That's my standard anywho. So far all I've needed to stick for public reading over the internet is a request for a bitstack writing/reading formula on cplusplus.com. I'm forever helping people on the chatrooms, generally unstructured questions are easier to receive there.
The only problem is there's no way to optimise your code without someone more experienced looking at it. I've replaced fwrite() with fputs() and malloc() with calloc() thanks to chatroom coders. If you're a regular who helps others, the veterans are happy to help you.
PS: My bitstack question probably was the only Type 1 I've encountered. See it here. I did do a lot of research.
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Agreed. Though with regards to Type 2 - if they're intelligent enough to find a forum, signup for an account, verify the account, and post a question, one would think they'd know how to use Google!
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Perhaps we should raise the bar for forum subscription then?
How about adding a little questionnaire? I vote for questions on pointer arithmetic and template metaprogramming.
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Great idea... though I'd be concerned if I'd still be allowed on the forums  Maybe something as simple as the "skill testing" questions that you see on various contents would be enough to weed out the most ridiculous forum questions... what is (6+3)x(10/2)?
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xperroni wrote: With the middle ground all but covered, questions will virtually always come up
from the extremes:
1. Very difficult and/or novel questions from
very smart people, who did look for references but couldn't find
any;
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't
bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.
That however is a matter of perception.
I suspect there are a number of mathematicians that would find any number of problems "trivial", yet which even the most enthusiastic beginning hobbyist would find very difficult.
As an example in programming I now find it trivially easy to understand recursion and even to unroll a recursive methods. But I also remember that when I was first introduced to recursion it took me 18 months to finally understand it.
Further your simplistic scenario ignored the simple statistical fact...people that post here, by definition, must be those that even if they did do research did not find or did not understand the answers they did find. Thus there could be tens or hundreds times the number of people who are successfully learning by themselves.
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