Being professional to professionals

Question

My favourite thing about SF is the 'professional' requirement. I think it's unique in that respect, in that I can't think of another technical Q&A site that has both critical mass and such a strict rule as to the types of questions that can be asked.

It seems to me that we should demand the same behaviour of ourselves when answering questions as when asking them; in other words, we should treat professionals in a professional manner. Without pointing the finger, I've seen too many instances (mainly in comments to questions) where the questioner is berated in rude and disrespectful terms, where all they've done is missed out a bit of information, very possibly by accident. Questioners shouldn't need a thick skin to participate here.

My question is: should SF go further than the 'be nice' requirement and, if so, what should the rule look like? I would argue that the answer is 'yes'. SF is different from other SO sites in requiring its questioners to be practitioners. In my opinion SF's community standards should reflect this.

Answer 1

I don't think there is any particular need to address that beyond the general requirement to be nice. In this field, as with many others, beneath the professional tone used at work, there are often a lot of sharp edges anyway, and being frank is a lot less passive-aggressive.

In many of the cases that someone has been berated, especially the higher-profile ones seen lately, it's been because the questioner is claiming to be a professional and yet shows more than a couple of these things:

• Unwillingness to learn, or to accept nontrivial solutions or change approach
• Demand for handholding and step by step, to the point where we are doing their job for them for free
• A sense of entitlement
• Clear evidence that they are not even remotely qualified to do what they are doing, far beyond what might be reasonable for a professional approaching a new problem or technology; a total lack of basic prerequisite knowledge

If someone demonstrates just one of these, they are likely to get some gentle prodding, from "I don't think you quite understand; read this" to "you should really think about hiring someone to take care of this". That's quite professional.

If someone demonstrates a couple or all of these, it's abundantly clear that this is not the place for them. Not only that, but a knowledgeable professional whose job is constantly made difficult by such people and who is often obliged to pretend to be nice to them has every right to be irritated at their attitude and say something.

While we should all certainly endeavour to be nice, charlatans are annoying, and it isn't clear what benefit accrues either to the community or us individually from humouring them.

Answer 2

I can be horrible to lazy idiots, just nasty, I know this and I know I'm wrong - but I can spot a pro from a mile away and will always respect them, in fact I quite often comment to them how good their questions or answers are.

Answer 3

I agree that people should not need an (especially) thick skin to participate on Server Fault -- We should strive to be a welcoming place for all competent professionals that fit our target audience (obligatory reference to pretty chart).

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In regard to comportment, the general rule for the main site (http://serverfault.com) is that it's the site's "office". You are expected to conduct yourself with a level of professionalism appropriate to a corporate/office environment with customers walking around, and we expect that participants on the site will treat each other with the same respect as they would a colleague.

Basically that means you can't swear, insult people's parentage, or call people names, and we expect that if you're going to answer the question your answer have the intent to help constructively resolve the problem being described (e.g. we have an absolute zero-tolerance policy for "destructive pranks" like posting rm -rf /* as an answer - that's a bannin').

It does not mean that we are obligated to be obsequious buffoons and try to help everyone no matter how poorly constructed their question, nor does it mean telling someone "You're doing it Wrong!", "Don't do that!", or "This is a stupid idea!" is verboten - telling people when we think they're wrong is important, otherwise they keep doing bad things.

We shouldn't be deliberately mean when telling someone they're Doing It Wrong, but neither should we pull punches to spare their feelings at the expense of their professional competence (or worse, their production environment's stability) -- As professionals we have an obligation to point out when someone is doing something bad, and to advise them not to do so.