Opening warning...this is a bit of a ramble. But like the blog tagline states, every draft is a first draft. I also work for Stack Exchange, but this is not speaking for my employer. These opinions come from my own experiences in a particular community...namely the systems administration community.
ServerFault is a question and answer website operating in the Stack Exchange network. Over the years it has gained traction as a resource for people looking for answers to various network and server-related issues, and it is a wonderful reference source. There are a large number of very talented and smart people donating their time and expertise to help people, and I am proud to have been an active member of the ServerFault community.
I'm not quite as active anymore, but I still lurk and poke my head in on occasion to see what’s going on. It is a trip down memory lane to see a common core of active members still trading memes, jokes that push boundaries a little too far on occasion, and what have become the typical responses given to repetitive situations encountered by the regulars on the site proper.
The visits are nostalgic, but they also remind me of some of the problems within the tech culture. I don’t know if it’s a attitude specific to ServerFault, but judging from discussions with others I’ve met in the tech world, I suspect it's part of the profession.
It’s a problem of expectations and how expectations are managed.
It’s not uncommon for complaints to periodically emerge in the chat regarding new user behaviors in seeking answers. It’s common enough that some people even write blog posts about the “right way” to ask for help as system administrators (in the context of the profession, usually, with ServerFault being the top of the chain of where to finish your quest). I’ll refrain from posting an example link here because, frankly, it does no good to single someone out for having an opinion when the attitude is quite prevalent among those who tend to be outspoken…if you’re interested, lurk in the chat areas and within a few weeks you’ll probably encounter a rant about someone’s question. If you’re an active participant on the site, you’ll probably see comments emerge that belie the undercurrent of disdain for someone’s mistake in asking a particular question. Sometimes people simply snap and there’s no attempt to disguise the contempt.
This isn’t a criticism of people being corrected on posting questions that don’t belong on that particular site. Shopping questions? No. How do I format a disk? No. How do I install a new font on Windows? That question goes over to Super User.
It’s not a criticism against managing the site to prevent discussions. Stack Exchange wants to become a canonical resource for answers to questions, not a forum of debate for best practices or personal opinion. That means that sometimes questions will have to be closed. Feelings will get hurt. New users will be angry, especially if they’re unfamiliar with how the site works. We accept that. And we invite people to lurk and learn and participate when they understand how to be good neighbors in our various communities. No hard feelings as far as the company is concerned...indeed, the company tries very hard to provide resources on how to ask questions within the context of the Stack Exchange network.
But there is a set of expectations from ServerFault systems administrators that can foster a hostile and off-putting environment. People with more than greenhorn reputation can be bitten by a lashing from more experienced community members. Somewhere along the career path for system administrators it seems a set of rules for what is the "proper" way to do something solidifies in the mind. You follow those rules, or you're stupid. Or misguided. But you're definitely in the wrong if you don't do something the right way. On ServerFault one key behavior the established users have come to see as the "right way" is to search for answers on your own in a sort of hierarchy before seeking help from others.
Before you dare post a question to ServerFault, you must make sure that:
You read the man pages
You googled the answer
You read the documentation
You read related RFC's
You tried variations on what you thought would work
You consulted other people's documentation
You tried some random shit to see what would happen
You called tech support
You consulted an astrologer
You slept on the question
Try a fucking fortune cookie. Never know, it might actually work.
New users are expected to know this before participating. But I don’t think it always works that way for people.
I can certainly understand the feeling. We have a resource that people should turn to only after they try to help themselves. If you don’t help yourself first, you’re not worthy of our collective wisdom. This is our creed. Why can’t people understand that helping themselves is more fulfilling? Why can’t they understand that if they understand the problem, and understand how to think this through, they won’t need to burden us with questions that they can answer themselves? And most of all, I'm being harsh with you so you will understand and thank me later for making you a better learner?
But putting people on a quest to find an answer, especially when they’re in the middle of trying to solve a problem, is hardly the way people respond to an issue. It’s detrimental from the community aspect if you tell someone they should be ashamed at having asked a question of a group of people if they didn’t do the prerequisite checklist first.
In the past I often had to stifle the knee-jerk reaction of insulting someone when they asked a question whose answer was already written up in a wiki page or handbook in the organization. “Why are you asking me that?,” I thought. “It’s right on the company handbook. Quick search would have given you that answer.” “How did <insert simple and repeated fix I’ve repeated at least three times to coworkers in a short span of time> not occur to you to try before asking me this?”
Eventually I realized it’s probably because I’m an available resource.
People don’t like that translation of documentation to their internal model of how things work. They dislike it more when they’re in the middle of a problem and having to figure out not only how the documentation pertains to their problem, but how to interpret and translate that understanding into a fix for their specific, current problem. It seems natural, and indeed, intelligent, for the right step to be going to someone who had this problem before and asking them how they dealt with it. That solves a problem much faster than a lesson on the proper progression of how to think and puzzle through the problem.
Also, if you think of how people kind of “work” psychologically, and you’ve read my diatribe this far, you probably know that you’re a rare person willing to read something this far before deciding, “Well, I’m bored, time to check FaceBook.” Words, words, words…get to the point!
But that’s exactly what’s being asked of these people before they can just ask someone…here’s my problem, what do I do?
It’s not my job to school people on how to be self sufficient in finding answers. I can facilitate this, but I can’t force it, and it’s certainly not my place to make people feel bad for thinking of asking me for assistance. If the information being asked for is already available, I reply with a link to the resource along with a note to let me know if that helped them. They might make a note of it for future reference. They might forget about it almost immediately. Doesn’t matter. I passive-aggressively provided a hint to help them help themselves in the future while still (hopefully) providing an answer tailored to their question.
What is being asked for is actually a mentoring situation. The expectation that people follow a procedure, despite not actually being in your company, or knowing how their life path has gotten them where they are now, means you expect them to follow a code within the profession of what to do before sighing and throwing up the white flag to approach you, the guru volunteer. The questioner is a burden. The guru is volunteering time to answer the the questioner couldn’t divine for themselves. You must follow the hierarchy.
Which is rather ironic, given that most of the systems administrators I talk to say they didn’t have formal training. They were thrown into a situation where they may have learned from others how things are done, if they were fortunate enough to have a team of more experienced people, otherwise they were expected to figure it out on their own.
Have you paid attention to what happens when you leave someone to figure out how to do something on their own? Especially something for which there may be more than one way to handle a problem or a workflow?
I’ll tell you what you get. You get emails where someone took a screenshot of a PDF document and pasted the image into a Word document to email as an attachment to me. Yes. This happened.
Or you get people who merge a set of PDF documents by printing them and re-scanning the printed sheets from multiple PDF’s into one scanned-in document. Yes. This has happened.
So you end up with systems administrators that never get formal training yet are ridiculed if they don’t know the expectations laid before them. How did they deal with problems? Probably using Google. Using Google takes you to websites where you drop into pages that offer solutions, maybe similar to the ones they’re having. But not quite. Maybe that brought them to a question an answer site like ServerFault. And…oh, you can ask questions. Here’s what’s happening. What do I do?
It’s no longer a world where people who aren’t “trained” will go directly to man pages. Did you know that man pages are even listed on the Internet now too? The manuals for new devices are often severely lacking, often because the manufacturer has come to rely on forums and knowledge base articles on their site for people to refer to when they have questions. I now get new hard drives that don’t have anything but a warranty packet included in the box.
And yet older, experienced systems administrators still live in a bubble where they expect people to have the same hazing…er, self-training?…they went through. Google is the new manual. And communities of users are the best resources for finding help to a specific problem.
I think it may be more productive for people to start viewing themselves as a resource. I in no way demean mentoring; I’ve complained about the lack of mentoring attitude in various companies. But ServerFault is not a mentoring website. It is a community of people volunteering their time to help people. It is a place where people with problems come to find solutions from people in a like-minded field.
It’s painful to talk to someone and have them tell me that they have heard of ServerFault, but they steer clear of it because it is so unfriendly to people or makes them feel stupid for not knowing something. Yes, that has happened, despite my knowing that so many people have received help from the ServerFault site. Too often people seem to have to pierce a "thick skin" barrier to get the help they're seeking.
As a contributor to the website, before you give in to the urge to ask someone if they’re huffing powdered plaster or if they were always so ignorant about “Googling” for a solution before they imposed on your time, try to step back and empathize with new people. Newer systems administrators that “fell into” the job role, and haven’t spent the time you spent having to navigate a pre-ServerFault world. Heck, you probably remember when equipment came with half-decent manuals. Or just think of the last time you felt like a mental defective because you dared ask someone something only to have it dawn on you two seconds after it left your sound hole that you could have looked up the information on your own. The very sin that makes you bristle.
Realize that the methods by which people naturally learn to deal with issues…like Googling for a problem that then drops them right into ServerFault, and to the end user, ServerFault is just as valid a resource as a software project’s website, and that maybe it’s even better because it’s a community of people that they can connect with for help…are changing. And it’s not your place to tell them why what they learned as a methodology is necessarily wrong.
And realize that if you wanted to see change to better suit what you think works best, even if you find a group of like-minded individuals to validate your beliefs, you need to work on finding a way to reduce the number of times I interview people who tell me they had no formal training in systems administration. They had no mentors. They had no guidance, and were self-taught. Because the path of self-teaching often means they’re not going to know, let alone care, about your list of prerequisites for being worthy of your help.
And most of all realize that when it comes to sharing your knowledge and experience, let this be a rare burden, and a frequent honor. Put back into the world something good. And try to leave the place a little better than you left it.
No comments:
Post a Comment