Timeline for How to make people new to programming stop asking me questions and distracting me?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 23, 2017 at 12:40 | history | edited | CommunityBot | replaced http://stackoverflow.com/ with https://stackoverflow.com/ | |
| Nov 30, 2011 at 16:03 | comment | added | John | @Marek: Of course. If the OP's time were the only consideration, polite avoidance would be the best way, but I suggested that helping others would solidify his understanding even more under the right circumstances. | |
| Nov 30, 2011 at 15:51 | comment | added | Marek | Listening to them explain their code would take even more of his time, wouldn't it? Even though if he takes the other advice and charges money for it, then it is a different story :) | |
| Feb 10, 2011 at 16:49 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki | ||
| Feb 10, 2011 at 16:17 | comment | added | user1249 | @Mason, age old trick. We call it "Grandmothering" here. | |
| Feb 10, 2011 at 3:30 | comment | added | ocodo | See Rubber Duck Debugging, you don't even need another person. | |
| Feb 10, 2011 at 2:28 | comment | added | Orbling | +1 For the last sentence, exceptionally true. Usually the highest stage of understanding: 0) Don't understand it, 1) Understand it basically, 2) Under it well, 3) Could explain it to another. | |
| Feb 10, 2011 at 2:27 | comment | added | Orbling | @Mason Wheeler: Ensuring they learn the answer, rather than just receiving it amounts to a "give a man a fish..." argument, very worthwhile. | |
| Feb 10, 2011 at 1:00 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | +1 for having them explain their code to you. Not 10 minutes ago I helped a coworker solve a very frustrating problem this way. He'd been beating his head against a memory corruption issue all day. He knew it had to be somewhere in the call stack, but he'd been through the whole thing and couldn't find it. So I told him to walk up the stack with me. A few minutes in, as he was explaining what was going on, he looked at one line and said "hey, wait a second..." and there was his problem as plain as day. But he never noticed it until he had to analyze it with someone else sitting there. | |
| Feb 10, 2011 at 0:48 | history | answered | John | CC BY-SA 2.5 |