You remember the last time you were just getting into something, you asked someone a question and were told that you were dumb, an idiot, retarded, or similar, for asking, and not googling, or researching it yourself?

Being an admin, I have to keep my personal bias out of my judgement on this site, and one thing I've worked hard on is keeping this bias aside.  But in order to vent, I figured I'd blog about this.  No this isn't happening on our site...much.  Thankfully!  But I do see it a lot on the net.

When people are new, they ask a lot of questions, why?  because they want to learn.  This should be encouraged shouldn't it?  Especially if it's something YOU happen to know a lot about, you should be flattered, they not only think the thing you worked hard to learn is interesting, but they recognise you are an expert.  Wonderful.  So what's the problem?  I don't see one.

Yet when asked, many people snipe back with "Stop asking me!  You should be researching this yourself".  Now honestly that in and of itself is not a terrible answer.  It's understandable that the more you know on a subject, the more people bug you for information.  I work in IT myself, and I get asked simple questions all the time.  It can be taxing.  Well, ok, fine, so you don't have the time and energy to teach the world how it works, when you had to gruel through blood, sweat, and tears, reading old books that were nearly falling apart, walking up-hill both ways, to get to find out what they want spoon-fed to them in an answer.  BULL!  Get off your high horse and understand, that if people need to research or learn things for themselves, then they need to learn this, POLITELY!  This means that instead of beating them down, give them an answer that doesn't just solve it for them, but tells them what they need to do.  For example:

Q: "I want to configure a Memcached server to interact with PHP, caching MySQL queries".

A: "If you go to website x, it can tell you all about it."

Providing a website, or mentioning a book isn't giving them an answer directly, but it's MUCH better then giving them a book long lecture about how they shouldn't ever speak to another human being about a topic until they have several pHDs in the subject.  And if they press on "but you know about this right?  Can't you just tell me?", I usually offer back "Well it's not a simple answer, and I apologize, but I don't have the time or energy right now to write you a manual on how to do this.  You should find all you need on the website".  That's as mean as I get on that matter, and There are probably even better ways to handle it.

This is just something that really pisses me off.  Learning should be encouraged, not beaten out of people with a lead pipe filled with acid.