"Person A: I need to reinstall this computer with Debian, but I don’t have a CD or DVD burner or any flash media. I’m not sure if I have any other options. Could you help me?
Person B: I don’t have time. Just use PXE."
The author is contriving a bullshit situation to make her point. If Person A is unwilling to ask what PXE is for fear of looking stupid, then they sure as shit aren't going to explicitly ask for help. Person A is only asking for help because she made them ask for help. That doesn't make any sense. If the problem here is communication like she says it is, she could at least provide a realistic communication scenario. How that conversation really went down:
Person A: I need to reinstall this computer with Debian, but I don’t have a CD or DVD burner or any flash media.
Person B: Just use PXE.
Oh snap. Now Person B seems like less of a complete asshole. He just thinks he's being asked an information question, not a request for ongoing help and support. The author is right, there is a communication problem. And she's part of it.
"Do you see what Person B did wrong, here? Person A was asking for help, and clearly does not know about netbooting (or they wouldn’t have asked). Person B assumes they know what PXE is and that they know how to use it, or at least that they can figure it out for themselves."
The only thing Person B did was give Person A enough credit to assume they were on the same level, probably thinking PXE just slipped Person A's mind. Do you get it? Person B's not being elitist. He's being the opposite of that. He's assuming that if you have any further questions, you'll just ask them because you shouldn't feel embarrassed to do so. But more impotantly: WHY THE HELL ARE WE NOT DISCUSSING WHAT PERSON A DID WRONG? If you don't know what PXE is, the solution is not to complain about the vast culture of elitism in the technology industry. The solution is to get over yourself and ask what PXE is.
> The author is contriving a bullshit situation to make her point.
I have been in these situations. They aren't bullshit. When you get a ton of good hackers in one area and a newbie comes in, it's a crapshoot. Nobody wants to hold someone's hand while they stumble around, fucking everything up in the process. "I've got things to do."
You're saying person A is to blame, at least a little bit. And you're wrong. Person A is just trying to learn. Person A is doing everything they know how to do in order to further their knowledge.
They asked. They googled. They spent an hour trying to figure it out on their own. Why didn't they just ask person B again? Because they got shut out the first time. They got a response that told them "fuck off, you're not worth my time. i'm busy" instead of "Sorry, you should read about using PXE to netboot from the BIOS". They just said "use pxe". If a person doesn't know about pxe, they sure as hell don't know that it requires BIOS settings.
Person A is doing everything he/she can to learn. And Person B is being an obstacle.
Except ask what PXE is. If they had done that, Person B would've known that they needed all the help you're talking about, but he didn't because Person A didn't ask. People aren't mindreaders.
The fact that Person A didn't know that he could use PXE to solve his problem ILLUSTRATES that he doesn't know what PXE is. He shouldn't need to take step 2 and ask "What's PXE?" because it's OBVIOUS. You don't need to be a mindreader.
If you're going to expect the person with the answers to take the mental effort to figure out what the questioner does and does not understand, then I think it's also reasonable to expect the questioner to be honest and say "I don't understand what you just said" when it's true.
You claim it's obvious what the questioner does not know. I claim it's not. This is why teaching is hard. Having the answers is not enough. The hard part is sussing out what the student's incomplete or incorrect understanding is, then guiding them to something more complete and correct. This takes time, patience, and a surprising amount of effort on the part of the teacher. If you don't believe me, then try teaching people with zero programming experience how to program.
When it's someone's job to do that, well, that's their job. Students are often reluctant to say "I don't know what you just said." I had to read their faces to gauge understanding, or I'd have to ask them to repeat back to me, in their own words, what I just explained.
But we're talking about peers. And if peers are going to learn from each other, then there should be an understanding that teaching is hard, and that the person asking the questions has just as much (if not more) of a duty to be honest.
I will definitely concede your point. Teaching is not easy.
But I do have to say that in this PARTICULAR example, not knowing that PXE is the solution is a very clear, very easy to grasp next step to not knowing what PXE is.
I think how easy it would be to follow up with "what's PXE?" would be completely dependent on Person A's perception of Person B's attitude. If Person B seemed like a jerk, they'd be a lot less likely to ask.
Does anyone else find it somewhat funny that the presently highest post on this topic called the article's example bs, and then we've been discussing that very topic ever sense then?
Is it just me, or are we ourselves a case-study of exactly what she was making a point about in her article?
Context is important, here. The author is the chairman of SIPB, a group of students at MIT who spend part of their time helping anyone who happens by the SIPB office with computer problems. A low level of computer knowledge on the part of the questioner is the correct default assumption in her context.
I think a decent number of people recognize it's something of an issue, especially in corners of the Unix world (at the extreme, folks like rms, Theo De Raadt, and Ulrich Drepper are, uh, rather abrasive), and not only for gender reasons. There are a lot of "write good docs, be friendly to questions" kinds of initiatives floating around, and to pick one example, it's one of the nicer aspects of the Clojure community versus (parts of) the CL community. Not saying it's solved the problem, but I do think recognition that the classic RTFM approach isn't the best has been one of the bigger changes in the open-source community in the past decade. Projects also seem to increasingly write web-pages where the front page tells me what the thing actually is, instead of assuming I must know, which is great.
> Wouldn’t it be so much better to have more skilled people in computer science, to fix even more bugs and create even more brilliant pieces of software?
Maybe the problem is that in order to have good chances of becoming a good hacker you need to be the kind of guy that will be able to find the BIOS option yourself...
Btw I think that the low number of women in our industry is not related to this issues at all, but to cultural/evolutionary aspects resulting in a woman being not exactly happy with the idea of passing tons of long hours in front of the screen of a computer when in the teenager age range of your life (that is, when 99.99% of people become hackers).
You know, I hate elitist and pretentious people as much as the next person, and I do believe in trying our best to help others. But in this particular case it's not difficult to google for "install debian with pxe". The second result on google [1] says "If your client machine's BIOS supports it, you can then boot the Debian installation system from the network (using PXE and TFTP), and proceed with installing the rest of Debian from the network."
Are you still not sure what those things mean or what to do? How about going to #debian at freenode and asking questions? Maybe the guy in the story was an elitist, so what? This is 2010, there are other ways to ask for help (I know, I know, IRC is sooo 1990's ;-) Hell, these days we can even search for movies and watch people solving the problem! Or, alternatively, how about forgetting about messing with BIOS and borrowing a flash media from someone?
We are not talking about Aunt Tillie [2] here, we're talking about a MIT student. He or she doesn't need to know everything, but I think it's important to know how to find information and to solve problems without too much hand-holding. (although sometimes a session in person can be very helpful and one can learn things that are difficult to learn just by reading).
There are bazillions of books on social skills, but the target audience (in this case) don't read them. The only assumption one can make is that they don't care to learn.
Not only are the "tech" people being asked to help, they're being asked to help in only the way the questioner wants. Why doesn't the questioner (the person asking the favor of the others) read a book on how to interact with people with poor social skills?
This is a more constructive approach because it is easier to change yourself than to change others.
This observation is hardly new, but computer/tech stuff tends to attract the kind of people who will spend hours delving into the minutiae of an abstract system but don't care to spend much time understanding other people. It's also a common attitude in many free software projects that a working patch is basically the only worthwhile contribution and everything else is noise. That attitude has many benefits but being "welcoming" is not one of them.
Yes, the world would be a nicer place if people were more understanding, kind, and polite. I have yet to hear any realistic plan for making that happen, and the issue of making CS more "accessible" has been a talking point for over a decade with no results.
I would like to put across a slightly different perspective:
First, I am a guy, I admire people of all races, sexes, abilities, depending on what abilities they show and what achievements they had, that I admire in people
There are quite a few women in my life whom I admire:
1) my mom - she keeps learning new things and is ready to remold her beliefs even when she 60
2) my sister - I am not close to her, but find her inspiring in what she has achieved, used that inspiration in getting my own life on track
3) a colleague - she is super efficient, super smart, extremely capable, would put many men to shame
4) a few seniors in the company I work in who have reached very high positions, some very fast, found their advice and perspectives highly wise.
There is a common pattern among all the women that I admire, they are often simple (and quite often elegant) in how they look and dress, indicating they don't spend as much time on vanity as the average woman.
---------------
Now consider this: two people, forget about their sex:
Person 1 spends more time on activities that help her/him gather information in a field of knowledge(field 1), whether it be through first hand experience, reading books in that field, talking to peers and experts in that field.
because of this she/he will have more information, so when given a task in that field, can try/perform a task with more confidence than one with lesser information or experience in that field.
because she/he will have more confidence about that field, she/he will take up more tasks in the field, continuing a cycle of knowledge accumulation, increase in confidence and taking up tasks.
Now what would be the state of a person 2 who doesn't spend as much time on field 1 and spends time on other fields, be it beauty, sports, parties, gossip, etc?
They will have more confidence in dealing with these other fields than field 1, because that's where they have more knowledge and that will likely continue the cycle of knowledge accumulation, increase in confidence and taking up tasks in that field.
Now its a matter of which field pays more or has opportunities for self-sustainability, not that beauty and social skills have no value, they can even be critical sometimes. But then, everything is relative.
----------------
Of course, we have to keep in mind that women are under the burden of all our collective expectation, that they look good and that they are supposed to look good, from their mothers, sisters, friends, boy friends, husbands. So, please don't consider this as a judgment of women, its just an observation that is applicable, between men, women or between men and women.,
The author is contriving a bullshit situation to make her point. If Person A is unwilling to ask what PXE is for fear of looking stupid, then they sure as shit aren't going to explicitly ask for help. Person A is only asking for help because she made them ask for help. That doesn't make any sense. If the problem here is communication like she says it is, she could at least provide a realistic communication scenario. How that conversation really went down:
Person A: I need to reinstall this computer with Debian, but I don’t have a CD or DVD burner or any flash media.
Person B: Just use PXE.
Oh snap. Now Person B seems like less of a complete asshole. He just thinks he's being asked an information question, not a request for ongoing help and support. The author is right, there is a communication problem. And she's part of it.
"Do you see what Person B did wrong, here? Person A was asking for help, and clearly does not know about netbooting (or they wouldn’t have asked). Person B assumes they know what PXE is and that they know how to use it, or at least that they can figure it out for themselves."
The only thing Person B did was give Person A enough credit to assume they were on the same level, probably thinking PXE just slipped Person A's mind. Do you get it? Person B's not being elitist. He's being the opposite of that. He's assuming that if you have any further questions, you'll just ask them because you shouldn't feel embarrassed to do so. But more impotantly: WHY THE HELL ARE WE NOT DISCUSSING WHAT PERSON A DID WRONG? If you don't know what PXE is, the solution is not to complain about the vast culture of elitism in the technology industry. The solution is to get over yourself and ask what PXE is.