I asked a question on a forum about why a command wasn’t working. They said I didn’t have an interpreter installed on my computer and were making fun of me. I showed them that I had one installed and that wasn’t the problem, but they continued to talk sarcastically to me without explaining anything. Only one of them suggested the cause of the problem, and he was right, so I thanked him. Then another guy said that if I couldn’t figure it out myself, I should do something else and that he was tired of people like me. After that, I deleted my question, and now I’m not sure. And I don’t think I want to ask for help ever again
Nothing makes some sad sacks feel better about themselves than making fun of someone for not knowing what they have learned. Just know they have been pants on their heads stupid about something and had to ask for help. Count on it.
IRC is still pretty popular with programmers and in my experience people are helpful on the various tech channels (on libera.chat at least)
This is why I do actually use AI - teach and troubleshoot. Infinite patience is something technicians do not possess. Rather the opposite. Claude will happily spend hours explaining things or asking me background questions, or letting me ask questions I would be afraid to ask otherwise. I hated having to spend an hour or two simply researching for the QUESTION I wanted to ask so that people wouldn’t accuse me of being an idiot, because I used the wrong terminology or something. I still encounter this from other sysadmins at work, so I often ask Claude if my question makes sense or if there’s chance for confusion. As a result I actually learn a lot more, a LOT faster, and get the rough touch so much less.
Definitely a positive there. It might not always give you the right answer or lead you down the wrong path from time to time, but I’ve always found it to at least give me a good enough direction to go in rather than spending the next hour trying to find the right set of key words on google to find my answer
Which forum lol?
If you asked the question properly and they still gave you more grief than help, then it’s their fault for sure.
Without knowing the context - that’s key both questions, the one you asked then and the one you’re asking now - we can’t be sure what happened. And I’m not going to jump to conclusions about how much context you started with in your actual question because that is no help to you.
I say point us to the question – and accept we’re going to answer honestly.
Being good at programming does not correlate with good people skills or good teaching skills. As you have noticed asking questions on the Internet attracts assholes that want to flex their “intellectual superiority” at others.
Learning programming is hard. Assholes making beginners afraid to ask questions makes it even harder. But I promise you that once you get decent at it, it goes from frustrating to rewarding.
Being in the industry, I don’t think they are. Forums attract chronically online and miserable people who are not there for beginners but for their own motives.
…what is is to be a woman in STEM. and why a lot of women leave and why it’s a sausage party. And also why women online often disguise themselves even in games.
That being said I suggest this when some rando online is trying to pressure you: when a person is so fragile to be easily annoyed by your existence: exist harder. They are the fool for giving you such power. Lean into it. Ask more questions. Watch them stir in their seat overreacting.
Cuz one thing I’ve learned is when you are that brave: there are twice as many newbies hiding around you thinking you’re awesome for asking all the hard questions.
Don’t delete because of some elitist assholes. Leave it up for the other newbies. Get more newbies up in their business.
The women I’ve met in STEM both during my college days and in my career have always been far more welcoming and willing to share their expertise than the lions share of men.
Never going to forget the TA I went to back when I was a freshman who not only juggled 5 different people asking questions but helped take a concept I was struggling with and made it clear as day.
The trades are the same way, unfortunately. When the first woman apprentice showed up, all these guys started acting like they’ve never seen a woman before.
The quiet guy who I thought was one of the nicest people there told the apprentice that she belonged in an office. Others wouldn’t let her do anything “dangerous” or over explained all the simple shit to her. Others would just hang around her for uncomfortable periods of time. It was truly bizarre to witness.
She ended up only coming to me for work related questions because I was one of the few people who treated her like a person and not like a little girl. That’s how I found out all the gross and fucked up things the guys were saying to her. She didn’t last long and left for another company which already had women working there. I worked until I got terminated for bringing up issues with the work culture.
During the fight about work culture with management, the vast majority of my coworkers turned their backs on me. Treated me like an idiot and isolated me. They were all so fragile and scared they would have to change their awful ways.
I ended up quitting my apprenticeship and decided to never return to the trades. I can’t stand the culture and I no longer have the energy to fight alone.
Any woman that can remain in the trades or STEM is way stronger than I’ll ever be. I couldn’t imagine myself dealing with that shit daily for an entire life.
I hear you. Yes, It’s definitely easier when there are at least already one or two women already present.
But sometimes you have to watch your back sometimes even then. Cuz there can be the ‘pickme’ ladies that lean into the misogyny. I’ve come by some real toxic ones that had rap sheets of other victims all women that had bundled together and basically had group therapy about the same woman.
That’s where I start saving every single email they (the toxic ones) send me. I’ve taken one or two out in my day just on ‘accidently’ forwarding an email they sent me they thought they had me too intimidated to send. I was just biding my time giving them false confidence.
Strength sometimes takes a lot of patience to help a person fuck up in front of the wrong line of people.
Document everything.
Though I’m hoping current days are getting better where this kind of toxicity is easier to call out. I’ve notice some of the more recent places of work that they even encourage and prefer calling it out in the moment with HR and not having it be dealt with in such a chaotic way. Though that can also be dependent on how good your HR is. (Watch out for HR using the catch phrase ‘conflicting personalities’ is a dead give away you got a dud HR)
Strength sometimes takes a lot of patience to help a person fuck up in front of the wrong line of people.
That’s very much what I did. While causing noise with management, I made friends with someone who worked for corporate HR. My first email to her basically predicated what would happen if I raised a complaint to management. I gained her trust by focusing on changing the work culture and not looking for retribution.
I got terminated, lawyers got involved and in the end I got a my severance and banned from working with that international corporate. The HR manager of my company was forced into leaving the company before her retirement. If I didn’t play nice with corporate HR, the company HR manager would have probably worked until retirement like nothing happened.
I now have a new hate for bureaucracy that’s on a deep and personal level but at least I came out with some wins at the cost of some sanity.
Yikes yeah that place sounds rotten to the core. I’m glad you got out of it and hope you found safer ground ! Glad you kept your sanity too. That can be a challenge in such situations where you can feel the walls closing in.
Some people are just dick. There might be a bigger crossover between programmers and socially inadequate people, but thankfully it’s not a complete overlap (I hope).
Hopefully you’ll find saner people somewhere else. It’s fine being snarky with people you know and know can handle it, but doing so with stranger online really looks bad moist of the time.
I’m an it professional and I am sad what happened to you.
However, without knowing details I could not pass judgement on what went wrong. Yes, people (not only in it!) are elitist assholes oftentimes but maybe something very basic was off (which you might not have even known, missing experience) and so on and so forth.
Being in the field for decades I can say that there’s nothing I have not seen.
Do not lose hope and carry on if you’re interested.
Just an asshole. My experience is different. Know that you learned from others and stood on the shoulders of giants.
The whole “pay it forward” culture is a thing. So next time, ignore that fucker and teach new people.
I have trained 6 people to fill my shoes in my role. 1 gave up. 1 got fired. 1 was never really a programmer and that resulted in an argument with management about the role actually needed (they call it tier 2 support but you need to be a competent programmer to debug the issues). 2 of the others took other jobs for much more pay. The last guy is still here and he’s good I guess…
But I’m tired man… Tired of explaining the same things over again. It’s not the new guy’s fault but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve grown jaded. I tend to realize I being a jerk, apologize and tone it down. Doesn’t change the fact that my gut response is jerkish.
Okay, I understand. This leads me to believe that programming is not really for everyone and I should reconsider my choice so as not to regret anything in the future. I hope you enjoy the rest of your work.
You shouldn’t reconsider your choice because you ran into a butthole on a forum. Block and ignore the trolls. As a beginner, you’re going to hit a lot of walls where you might need some help. It’s unavoidable.
Block assholes and ignore down votes. Pay attention to those who are willing to help. I immediately block anyone that gives a sarcastic or unhelpful answer.
If you have a genuine interest in how things work in software and in being a great programmer, that passion will do more to carry you than finding another field with fewer arrogant assholes.
But if you’re just trying to learn because it makes good money or because it’s a job you decided on but don’t particularly care about, it might be a struggle.
This applies to any kind of work. Having that fascination and interest in the work itself will make it much easier to learn and thrive (unhelpful assholes aside).
I don’t think it’s just programming I think it’s most jobs in general. It’s just very evident cuz programming and IT and and overall is very in focus now. Most people that have been in a job for any length of time tend to have short tempers because " it’s easy to get this job. Cuz they don’t remember how hard it was for them in the beginning. They expect everybody to come in. Not only that but most of those people coming in are getting paid close to the same if not sometimes more than the person training them. So you tend to give up after a while.
As someone in a programming adjacent job (which still involves a lot of coding and debugging, looking at my current career in comparison with other jobs I’ve had I think it’s not all jobs, but it’s about jobs that require specificity.
Some pick up the fundamentals on their own and end up getting good at it. Some pick up the fundamentals, either through education or hobby, but never really get a good grasp on it. And some fail to pick up the fundamentals. Programming is a job that requires a certain level to at least be useful, and failing that can lead to a lot of frustration.
I don’t know I disagree with the specific jobs that require specific skills. I mean hell I’ve seen fast food workers that have been doing it for years get annoyed at people that come in and can’t do what they consider basic.
My only question is - would the issue be solved if you followed the manual properly?
Producers too, like music producers I mean. Though I can only speak to that field personally, it might be a similar situation, so I’ll share.
Well actually, I mean I guess it’s two things- one is that a male-dominated field with a lot of egos involved can pretty easily develop in a snooty direction. STEM careers are famous for that as well. It blows.
The second thing, the thing I was initially going to mention is that at least in the case of producing, there is an epic shitton of information you need to learn to do it well/properly, for starters. Even to just make your first piece, you need to actually STUDY it. That attracts two different archetypes, and the one that sucks is the overwhelming majority. :(
So, as you can probably imagine it’s super easy to find courses/tutorials online to learn stuff; you can find the whole field plus music theory on YouTube for free. The problem is that a lot of beginners don’t bother to do that, and/or don’t think they’ll need to. Unfortunately, it’s these lazy fucking casuals that saturate all our “ask someone who knows” spaces with asinine, uniformed nonsense questions.
So you see, by the time you see a question from a legitimate learner, sometimes even a peer, you’re so annoyed by the other sort that you can’t sort them.
That’s not fair to the legitimate learners, of course (and as someone who is not yet a full-on expert, I’ve been on the wrong end of this myself), but thats the sad state of things.
“Growing a thicker skin”, or so I’m told, is the only solution. :(
I think there’s a few different things worth addressing here, so please bear with me since this might be a long reply.
What you experienced here is, unfortunately, very common for anyone getting into tech. A lot of us can recall the first time reaching out somewhere for help and receiving a mixture of belittlement and vague answers as a response. I’d argue it’s probably one of the biggest issues we have in this space.
If I had to guess why tech forums are so vitriolic to newcomers, I’d say a lot of us simply forgot what it was like to be inexperienced. They forgot how daunting it is to want to learn, to run headfirst into a bunch of errors you barely understand, and then try navigating a sea of concepts and terminology that practically requires a dictionary of its own.
While the forums rarely get better (unfortunately), never let those people drive you away. It’s incredibly overwhelming at first, and there’s a lot of us who are long overdue for a slice of humble pie, but someday things will start to click and the things you want to do will start to come to life.
It’s late, I’m rambling, but you’ll your footing. When you do I hope you get the satisfaction of telling one of those assholes on the forums to shove it while giving another newcomer the welcome they need
