Well of course people are gonna keep calling on you, you're known as the guy who will cross the building to fix their work for them! What incentive does anyone have to borrow your copy of Mastering Regular Expressions when their problems can be fixed with a simple email to you?
Sometimes you really have two NOOP choices:
1. Give them a quick answer and point them to the book but they'll never read it and continue to interrupt even if you told them to not interrupt for trivial matters. On and now you're so much of patronizing dork. Back to square one.
2. Don't give them the answer, and point them to the book. Now you're the smartass jerk that doesn't socialize. Plus they won't read the book and invent some crazy solution to get shit done and later when you have to fix the mess the WTF/min ratio goes through the roof. Back to square one.
Which leaves you with three possible actions: DealWithIt, RageQuit, or RageFix, only one of them being a long term fix but things don't happen in a vacuum and you're not always in a position to do so.
I don't see the problem with choice #2. Being "the smartass jerk that doesn't socialize" means you don't get bothered with stupid questions as much, and having to "fix the mess" means that you get to be the hero when someone else's crap doesn't work, and you can put that in your weekly summary.
Re:Ask HN: What's your working day like?
by positivecomment on Monday May 08, 2017 @01:05PM
(#14293464)
Programmer who doesn't know regex is something like a system admin who doesn't know sed.
I do ok.
For example, I've become known as "the regex guy" at the office. I know regex really well as well as the ins and outs of the regex engines of languages we use. I don't mind when I get called over to help with a tough regex, or optimizing something. But way too often whatever I get interrupted and cross the building just to replace ".*" with ".+" or something equally simple.
I usually just type the solution and tell them my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions is on the office bookshelf if they'd like to borrow it, the first chapter should cover all the basics. I'm also very happy to explain the basics of regex to someone in my down time, but very few people have taken me up on that offer.