Some communities can be pretty hostile to newcomers. Not necessarily programming, but a lot of tech communities complain a lot about newbie questions, basically saying that they're not here to write config files for you, or things like that.
Some people revel in the 'secret clubhouse' mentality of being the only people to understand how some program works or something.
I think the number of people who enjoy being siloed experts is many orders of magnitude below what people think it is. I think in the tech community, most hacker types love helping others along. After all, somebody influenced us. I've met maybe one or two people my whole life who got sick enjoyment from watching people stumble, and even they eventually grew out of it. The problem is not that experts hate newbies, it's that they've already answered the exact same question fifty times. Were one to type that question into google, it would spit out hundreds of results saying the same things. The answer is already out there. As hackers, we follow the DRY rule, especially when giving help. If it's out there on the interweb, then please tell why we should explain it yet one more time.
In the end, it's a balance of efforts. While it would take the expert 15 minutes to craft a good explanatory reply, it would take the asker a few minutes to type it into Google and read the first few responses that pop up. For any good question, the burden of time should be on the asker.
Comments
Some communities can be pretty hostile to newcomers. Not necessarily programming, but a lot of tech communities complain a lot about newbie questions, basically saying that they're not here to write config files for you, or things like that.
Some people revel in the 'secret clubhouse' mentality of being the only people to understand how some program works or something.
I think the number of people who enjoy being siloed experts is many orders of magnitude below what people think it is. I think in the tech community, most hacker types love helping others along. After all, somebody influenced us. I've met maybe one or two people my whole life who got sick enjoyment from watching people stumble, and even they eventually grew out of it. The problem is not that experts hate newbies, it's that they've already answered the exact same question fifty times. Were one to type that question into google, it would spit out hundreds of results saying the same things. The answer is already out there. As hackers, we follow the DRY rule, especially when giving help. If it's out there on the interweb, then please tell why we should explain it yet one more time.
In the end, it's a balance of efforts. While it would take the expert 15 minutes to craft a good explanatory reply, it would take the asker a few minutes to type it into Google and read the first few responses that pop up. For any good question, the burden of time should be on the asker.