First off, why does your 12 year old have to be a girl? You are spouting off about diversity but you basically just used the stereotype that teenage girls are going to cry if you give them the hard truth. Why do we have to treat single mothers with kid gloves? Guess what, diving through some docs is a lot easier than anything a parent has to put up with.

3 of the 4 interns at the company I work for were women last summer, and they kicked ass. While they weren't 12 years old, they were young, and I had no issue telling them to start at the documentation.

There is a massive difference between "read the fucking manual" and suggesting "even if it takes longer, you will be better served starting with the documentation and working through that than googling or using stack overflow". One is bullying, one is teaching.

I always teach my interns to start with the docs. Give the docs 30 minutes before you Google or Stack Overflow. Give that 30 minutes before you ask a senior engineer. Struggling through it is part of the process of learning. The things you learn by going through the docs will help you later.

Or the shorter version, I want to hire someone that can answer Stack Overflow posts not find them.

  > I always teach my interns to start with the docs.
  > Give the docs 30 minutes before you Google or 
  > Stack Overflow. Give that 30 minutes before
  > you ask a senior engineer. Struggling through 
  > it is part of the process of learning. The 
  > things you learn by going through the docs will
  > help you later.

That's not asking, that's demanding that someone teach you. Its a brazen form of entitlement that completely disregards the state of the other person.

In regards to the gym, I don't go to the gym to wait around to randomly help some other person with their lifting techniques. I squeeze in going to the gym before or after work, to try to get in my exercise before I get home, so I don't die at 40. Don't be a dick and expect me to drop everything I'm doing because you don't know what you are doing. I am, literally, not here to help you.

If you really want somebody who is waiting around to help you, then your in luck: They are called personal trainers, and you can pay them to help you! If you don't have the money do that, then (god-forbid) you google it or get a book from the library and make a best effort on your own before getting pissy at me because I have other priorities than to make your life easier/less emotionally distressing.

And I think it's a lot easier to be a dick online, which is why programming in particular has a lot of these situations.

I think it's a lot easier to be perceived as a dick online, too, and that probably accounts for something like an equal share of the frustration that people walk away with.

However 2 things - #1 the bile you have for those asking for help is off-putting. #2 It takes more effort for someone to respond to a question and tell them off than it does to ignore it. And some of us in the programmer community would rather take the time to make a derogatory comment instead of either ignoring the comment or actually helping that person. THAT is the sign of a bully.

Except the culture of gyms, at least among most people to spend a lot of times at gyms and take fitness seriously, is to be helpful and charitable to others. Almost everybody I know who does any weight-lifting or anything related is always more than happy to help a n00b out if they have time.

Refusing to help someone if you're literally too busy is one thing. But a blanket attitude of "I'm not here to help you, ever, under any circumstances" is a pretty dick'ish position by the standards of many gym regulars. Of course it's your right to refuse anybody you want...

I guess what I was trying to say is if you were in the middle of a set and someone asked you for help I would be more understanding to the person being asked if they were annoyed about being bothered.

On the other hand you have to go out of your way to be an asshole on stack overflow, and yet it happens all the time. No one is demanding your attention or interrupting your code time to respond to a post on SO, and yet so many know it alls cannot help themselves by taking a swipe at the person posting a question. I just hate that attitude.

Maybe I should spend more time reading questions on SO and posting helpful responses.

Fair enough. There is an etiquette to things at the gym as well, and it may take a while to pick up on some of that stuff. Which is, I guess, the same as the Internet in some ways.

"Can you help me understand why this doesnt work?"

...is very different from...

"It looks like you know what you are doing, fix this for me."

..even though the outcomes are often very similar.

The relevant comparison would be to the gym's front desk. So, extending the metaphor:

1) Yes, it would be offputting if you asked them about lifts there and they just scoffed.

2) Yes, I have asked for help like this before ("where's the first aid kit, I'm bleeding?") and had that treatment, and it sucked.

3) But being pointed to the appropriate resource is a very reasonable response, and it's analogous to (a precise variant of) RTFM. It would be like:

"How do I lift?" -> "Oh, ask one of the people in red shirts."

"What are the rules?" -> "Oh, it's on that sign over there."

Not much different from:

"How do I make a website?" -> "start from this link"

"How do I make my DB queries faster?" -> "search for database index"

Btw, do you realize that your remark about diversity is sexist by itself? It assumes that females are not able to cope with the same conditions males do.

It depends on what "RTFM response" we're talking about. if it's simply,

1a) "Duh, read the docs" 1b) "RTFM"

then yes, it's abrasive and experienced programmers should cut it out. But we sometimes get the same flack for

2a) "Ah, that's called the controller and section 7 covers it."

2b) "Oh, I see. The term you're looking for is database indexing -- you should be able to get some good hits with that search term. Or 'add mysql index' for your case."

If someone is really like the diligent younger-me programmer you're referring to, they'll have already explained why the manual doesn't help.

You have to be careful not to equate the two kinds of levels of work (though obviously, politeness is always important, regardless of their level of effort).

As a father of 3 (11 yo girl, 9 yo boy, 6 yo girl) who actively works to teach all of my children programming (yes even the six year old); if someone is that delicate whether male or female then programming is not the right field. Any real programmer is going to eventually venture into unknown territory where they are unable to find an answer and they must learn to overcome.

My 11 year old daughter and 9 year old son are both currently learning Java (so they can do Minecraft mods). Our process looks like this.

1) Dad assigns chapter or chapters to read and implement lessons.

2) Child reads chapter twice. Then child reads chapter a third time while working through the exercises.

3) If child encounters and issue they are told to search the book for an answer.

4) If at this point they still have a problem they can't solve they are allowed to ask me. At that point I NEVER tell them what is wrong. Instead I ask leading questions that helps them to find the answer on their own.

Personally I wouldn't leave a RTFM comment because it is a waste of time and effort for all parties involved. However, if people leave the field due to these types of responses I think they are not well suited to being a programmer and the world has plenty of other great jobs to fill so they should consider pursuing a different passion.

Yes, yes, and yes. The best thing you can do for someone is show them their questions already have been answered because they have access to a massive, growing body of human knowledge.

> Is it really constructive to be so abrasive?

It's amazing that telling someone their questions have already been answered is abrasive.

Now, I am going to be abrasive, because I'm not talking to a beginner.

> Try to remember what it was like when you were first starting out with programming.

Ya, someone was going to to bring that up, like there is some sob story everyone has not being able to read documentation.

I'm not a programmer. I have to look up all sorts of beginner stuff all the time. Always have because I don't spend a lot of time getting better at it. I don't ever have to ask questions, and I haven't from before StackOverflow or where ever programmers asked questions before, because any question or issue I had had already been asked and answered (over and over). My problems have been encountered by everyone else at the same level of experience as I am. And because I do search for answers, I don't have to wait for someone to come along to answer.

Answering the same questions over and over without telling them they could have found the answer themselves is giving a man a fish. Your not learning simply being told answers.

> Ever been to a foreign country and have someone berate you for ... not knowing how to speak their language well enough?

No I speak English so I expect everyone else to as well. This is apparently appropriate behavior since it is appropriate to expect everyone else around me to answer ever question I will ever have without ever having to do any work or research of my own.

Ever asked a stranger out and been shot down harshly?

Part of the reason some people learn to respond this way is because there are so many people bothering them. One or two wouldn't be an issue. It may even be a small boost that they turn to you. But when it is person #6214, with the same problem, and the same solution, which is well documented for someone out there, it gets hard to keep responding kindly. In the same way that you aren't likely to be as nice saying no to the #6214 person interrupting you at a bar to ask you out.

I don't think this is a great example. Just because it happens doesn't mean that's a great response, either. It probably took courage for someone to work up the guts to ask you out. Even if you have no desire of accepting their offer it's just common decency to decline with respect and not make them feel like absolute crap while doing it. The same thing could be said for answering questions - except it's even easier, because when it comes to a question StackOverflow you don't have to even respond to not be an asshole. If someone doesn't feel like it's worthy of their time they can just move on and not say anything at all.

That would be true if men were treated any differently. If anything they are treated worse.

Kid gloves can preserve flighty women in IT, but it's not the reason there's so few.

An important bit of context is implicit in both your comments, and I think the context is different, which is where some of the differences in your stances are.

It's very important to know the purpose of the asker when answering a question. If the little girl or a single mother are trying to accomplish a single thing, right now, and their purpose is not to learn, then yes, just answer the question or don't bother commenting. If their purpose seems to be to learn, then teaching them both skills on how to better teach themselves and on better ways to approach the problem are ultimately more useful.

Does it really help that single mother trying to switch careers more to be told how to fix her HTML parsing regex[1], or would she be better served with a suggestion on a library that provided a more sane way to accomplish that capability? Of course, as a community we could do better at being more civil, and providing both answers, but if ever there was a place where the "teach a man to fish" parable fit, this is it.

1: Not to start an inflammatory discussion on that. I regularly use regexen to parse well formed specific HTML pages. The trick is knowing where it's appropriate and where it's not.