Timeline for Perception of purpose
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 28, 2010 at 21:03 | comment | added | Evan Anderson | Personally, I don't care whether a question is coming from someone "sitting at home" or from "a corporate environment". I make the call on answering (or voting to migrate) based on whether or not the question and my answer will, later on, be helpful to someone who is a professional sysadmin. If the question is something that likely would occur for someone in a professional capacity (with a basic professional skill-level) I'll happily answer. If the question is so basic as not to occur to someone who is a professional then I'm going to abstain from answering or vote to migrate. | |
| Jul 28, 2010 at 10:24 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | John, I would welcome such a question because I don't differentiate between someone who is sitting at home doing their own thing and someone working in a corporate environment. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that it is my responsibility to help everyone that I can. My reaching out and helping everyone who needs it, I am helping that one person better understand how to design, build, deploy, and maintain software and therefore making my life easier. | |
| Jul 28, 2010 at 1:24 | comment | added | John Gardeniers | @Thomas, on a site intended only for professional programmers, how welcome would a question about writing a "Hello world" program in BASIC be? SF should not be rendered useless by similar level questions in our field. If you have an IT problem at home either ask about it on an APPROPRIATE site or perhaps pay one of us to fix it for you. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 6:20 | comment | added | Ward - Trying Codidact Mod | "...because they aren't here." Yes, they are. Offhand, looking through the first page of users, I've seen answers from at least half of them that are unarguably expert. Well-written and demonstrating a thorough understanding of the topic. As I recall, Evan isn't interested in writing books, but if he were he could take some of his answers and make a chapter of a best-seller out of them. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 4:41 | comment | added | Warner | You epitomize exactly what would drive me away from SF, Thomas. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 2:48 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | My phrase "don't need" was a little extreme, yes. But really, the questions and answers should focus on the beginner, notice, intermediate, and advanced realms - the top experts in a given field probably aren't the ones browsing a Stack Exchange (asking questions or giving answers), but instead writing papers and books that the people here will read. You can't cater to the experts (and I mean the true experts - I'm not going to lie, you aren't an expert, at least in the sense that I'm using the word) because they aren't here. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 2:36 | comment | added | Zypher | @Thomas:"The way I see it, experts don't need the exchange. They already know most of what they need to know" - That is a pretty naive point of view. The more of an expert I become, the more I realize i don't know half of what I thought i knew. Also as I gain responsibilities, or move to new positions, I now need to learn new skills. You are never truly done learning. Now what SF strives to do to differentiate its self from say Yahoo!Answers is to cater to the experts specifically. Not to say we want to shun novices, but create a place where the hard questions can be asked and answered. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 2:03 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | You need to accept both groups of people. Apparently, more needs to be done to attract the more experienced system administrators (the advanced and expert groups), and that's not my concern - that's the job of the person Jeff and Joel appointed to oversee ServerFault and do what Jeff and Joel managed to do for StackOverflow. My concern is being able to ask my novice and intermediate system administration questions, getting answers, and learning. Right now, that's not happening. If StackOverflow can address everything from the students to the Jon Skeets, ServerFault can, and must, do so as well | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 1:39 | comment | added | Doug Luxem | @Thomas Who is going to answer the novice questions if the site does not attract experts? My concern is that much of the activity on the site is not from professional sysadmins, but more people in your role. The result is that the activity on more technical/difficult questions is quite low and answers only come from the same dozen or so people. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 1:26 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | The way I see it, experts don't need the exchange. They already know most of what they need to know. The people who want to learn are the ones who need the exchange - the students, novices, and intermediates who want to become advanced or experts in a given field by interacting with and learning from those who are currently experts. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 1:25 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | I just want to clarify that more: There are four groups of people that I've seen. The experts - the high-rep, core users (the "Jon Skeet"s of each exchange). The intermediates/advanceds - the middle rep users who make up the bulk of the regular users of an exchange. The novices - people who are in the process of learning the field, who typically answer more questions than provide answers but want to move up. The drive-bys - people who ask a few questions and move on. An Exchange should cater to the novices through experts - allowing people to collaborate regardless of skill level. | |
| Jul 26, 2010 at 1:17 | comment | added | Thomas Owens | I disagree - I think that a Stack Exchange should be accessible to everyone with an interest in a particular area. Yes, you are going to have those questions that are of the expert level, but you also are going to have novice and intermediate questions. How else do you move up from a novice to an expert unless you can ask those questions? You don't. Joel's posting on that suggestion for lawyers is just wrong - sure, support the experts, but allow for well written, well thought out novice questions. | |
| Jul 25, 2010 at 23:59 | comment | added | Kyle Brandt | Also the role of system administrators has been different in my experience than what you suggest. Our job is generally to support the technology infrastructure of the company's mission. Often that does involve supporting the developers but the primary goal is to support the goal of the company. | |
| Jul 25, 2010 at 23:56 | comment | added | Kyle Brandt | When you say "There are times when I am at home, working on a project, and have an IT or system administration problem - when such a problem arises, I should be able to turn to the experts in the field, who should be found at Server Fault." Is really not the point of these sites (not just Server Fault). These sites exist for the experts in the field to support other experts in their respective fields. Joel is more eloquent than I by far so I recommend his answer regarding a Stack Overflow like site for lawyers: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5533/proposal-for-a-law-se/… | |
| Jul 25, 2010 at 23:29 | history | answered | Thomas Owens | CC BY-SA 2.5 |