Getting along in the Python community [LWN.net]

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 24, 2018 1:12 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Getting along in the Python community by k8to
Parent article: Getting along in the Python community

> If people can tell your answers are canned,

If the person asking can tell the answer is canned then he or she wouldn't have asked the question in the first place, or at least not that way.

There's often a big gap between "total noobs" who are very grateful to receive *any* kind of information because they don't even have the right keywords to Google versus the experts which obviously do have these keywords, can find anything in a few keystrokes, can lose track of how far ahead they are and too easily misjudge someone asking a dumb question as incapable of homework. Canned answers are perfect for these specific situations (obviously not for every situation).

> the implication can be that you aren't willing to engage with the addressee as an individual,

I understand the concern/fear but I don't think it's warranted in practice.

The only two other alternatives are:
- ignoring the question: obviously even less willingness to engage and more frustration
- longer and then often emotional answer - understandable but not productive emotion

> Or it can imply disrespect for the persona being responded to more generally.

Again that's exactly the misconception which I tried to point at in my previous comment. In not all but many cases (and you can easily tell which) the thing the most desired by the person asking the question after hours of trying and failing to perform some task is ANY attention and clue = infinitely better than none. See parent article.

I've sent countless one-line answers and pointers at work and I never ever saw anyone complaining, often the opposite. I assume most people asking questions in an open-source community do it as part of their day job and while operating in a work environment and mood. Much fewer do it while bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon looking for human interaction. IMHO a good open-source community should be exactly like a good workplace: you can (and you do) make friends but you should never feel like you have to.

> In a customer context,

BTW I wasn't and I am still not considering a customer context, many differences.

> One liners also are prone to leaving a thing much less fully addressed,

Yeah sure you can go too far; not considering that either.

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Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 9:58 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

It depends very, very strongly on the quality of your canned answer, though.

If your canned answer boils down to "RTFM or GTFO. Docs at https://example.org/docs", then you're going to have a bad experience as a recipient. If your canned answer boils down to "https://example.org/docs/reporting-a-bug has details of the information we need to handle a bug quickly; please get us that information so that we can help you", then the recipient is likely to have a better experience.

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 15:42 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

I found that merely sending a link without any F-word works fine.

Not sure what you mean by "quality"; IMHO as long as your emotion level is low when you write the answer and you pay a fair amount of attention to your choice of words then the length of the answer will - contrary to a common misconception - not make any difference to the recipient's emotions.

Long story short I guess all I'm saying is: in _some cases_ using email for instant messaging is the best option.

In an ideal world people would use IRC or some other instant messaging tool for instant messaging, however neither the world nor IRC are perfect. Of course you could make your one-line answer a two-lines answer by adding a link to IRC :-)

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 15:48 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It then depends on the quality of your link - if it's a good link with lots of help, then the fact that it's a canned response is a non-issue. If the link basically says (politely or otherwise) "go away, I don't care about you", then it's going to upset people.

E.g. linking people whose e-mail matches your "bug report" filter to something like Mercurial's BugTracker wiki page isn't offensive - there's a lot of information in there on how to get attention, and how to get helpful responses.