Why techies get annoyed
Many times I hear people say how they hate when their friend gets mad at them for asking questions. I have been on both sides of this, I often get annoyed after receiving a number of questions, and I have complained about the way people have acted with me in the past. Looking back I see what I did that annoyed people and I try very hard to avoid those situations.
Continuous questions, you ask one question and instead of taking that question and doing something with it you make a person elaborate on every detail of their answer. It is sort of hard to survive in the tech world without staying on top of the latest topics, and constantly learning new things, and because of that many of us have spent a lot of time searching and reading articles, tutorials, manuals to get to where we are. Beyond reading we break a lot of things to learn what we know. I cannot tell you how many times I have installed Windows or Linux and sometimes I learn something new, but now it is just mind numbing at times. When you ask a question, and someone gives you an answer that builds on something else you are not aware of take a couple minutes and search Google. I’ll give an example… Lets say you wanted to have a machines, a file server, to store all your files. You ask a friend for help and he starts mentioning RAID, and that RAID5 is going to be pretty safe. What you should do is search Google for RAID5, read through the description and if there is something you don’t understand you could then ask a question about something specific. “What exactly is parity?” might be one, but in situations when someone gives me an answer like that I will do multiple searches on the terms I unfamiliar with. This does a couple things, it shows the person you have a genuine interest in understanding, that you just need a push in the right direction, and that you respect their time.
What sparked this post was that someone on a mailing list I belong to asked about installing KDE in Ubuntu so that he could switch back and forth between KDE and Gnome, an email sent on the 8th of May. A few of us gave him commands he could run, and links to topics related to this, each one being shot down for some reason or another. Eventually a couple people made comments about how maybe Linux wasn’t for him, and so on, and he started to get defensive, which he has the right to do, but he started explaining how he works with over 100 servers and has been using Linux for like 8 years. Someone called him out by saying that with that much experience he should have been able to install KDE, which is very true, there might have been a couple problems to fix, but finding what packages to install should have been quite simple. The user then came back with this email about how we must have unlimited time to learn all of this stuff, and how he doesn’t have the time to spend figuring something out that many people have figured out already and then ending the email with comments about how if the list becomes unhelpful he will unsubscribe.
A big mistake he made was sounding ungrateful for the help he did receive. He thanked a few of us as we replied, but they were “Thanks, but” replies, telling us what was wrong with our response. By giving the attitude that your time is more valuable than ours is not the greatest way to get help. If you really want to make it about the value of an hour unless you are a doctor or a lawyer we can most likely bill more per hour than you can. Acting like you are some big shot by listing off the stuff you do isn’t a great thing to do either, you don’t know the audience, when you have people with a lot of experience hearing you make comments about how awesome you are, and you can’t install KDE it really makes you look like an ass.
Before you send an email to a list or to a group you need to think about the time you are taking away from other people’s day. If 200 people read your email, and it takes them 2 minutes a piece, but the answer to your question shows up in the top 5 results in Google, you just wasted 400 minutes of people’s time for something you could have found in 5 seconds. In the case of this guy it took me longer to read his replies than it did to search for a quick howto or give him a command he could run to find out what to install.
I hope this helps some of you who have been annoyed at your friend or acquaintance because they came across as having an attitude or they got upset with you.
