At the risk of being annoying and dating myself, ;) I've been told my entire life that I was in the first generation of Americans that would do worse than their parents, that I was doomed to a life of poorly paid temp jobs, etc. This has not been true. It's my opinion--worth what you paid for it--that everyone will always tell you you can't get another job, and that there's always another job. IT seems to suck a lot less than people make out compared to libraries and teaching college, so maybe my basis of comparison makes me overly optimistic.

Yeah, I had one the other day that looked like a reasonable question until he clarified in the comments. As soon as he admitted that he didn't know how to [do unbelievably basic GUI tool task] I VTCed and walked away briskly, avoiding eye contact.

I'll sometimes answer the odd, "I know this is a terrible approach, but management says I have to do it this way, and I lost that fight. How do I do it?" out of sympathy. I remember losing similar battles with PHBs past. Part of the Tao for me is tone; I'm most likely to respond to "resigned." That said, I'm no help to the OP, because I'm not really an expert on hammering rpmbuild into doing ugly, terrible things. And honestly, if this is a common thing, I think they need to find other employment where they're not asked to do hideous things on a regular basis.

Are you, by any chance, on a shared (or even a computer lab) computer?

FWIW, @kvz, I don't think I voted on this, but if I had, I would have voted to migrate. Since it's compiling code and dependencies, I would have considered it more of a Stack Overflow question myself. That's also just my opinion.

@ewwhite Oh. It occurs to me that maybe I should also add: I follow Brent Ozar on Twitter, and he promotes dba.stackexchange.com pretty hard. And yet, I'm here. :) Similarly, one of my friends that I've been encouraging to post here is instead in the top 3% of rep for Stack Overflow this month for posting PowerShell answers. :) I think you just click with a Stack Exchange site.

Stack Overflow is busier. I think that's because there's more dev than ops. I do try to promote Server Fault to my friends, because I think it's a great site, but I don't think it's fair to compare us to Stack Overflow because of the sheer volume difference. Entertainingly, my boss (a developer!) once asked me if I'd ever heard of Server Fault, and I was able to tell him I had over 1000 rep points on Server Fault. (That'll date the question, ha!). He was impressed. :D

Server Fault and Stack Overflow kept coming up in my googling, and one day I decided it would be fun to answer questions rather than just googling up other people's answers.