Evan Martin (evan) wrote in evan_tech,
Evan Martin
evan
evan_tech

stop right there

People at Google are generally quite civil and helpful. I don't have much other experience to contrast it with but I'm never reticent or scared to post on mailing lists asking for help. With that disclaimer in place, here's one of my favorite work-mailing-list stories.

There was a complicated internal service (details intentionally vague here) that people often had problems with. Someone began a thread like this: "I don't know much about [broad category of this problem], but I think we could use [new technology Y] to solve it. For example, it would [x y z] and I could [example scenario] and [etc] ..."

This prompted the response:
> I don't know much about [broad category of this problem], but

wait wait wait; stop right there.

The response often passes through my mind when I read people trying to talk about technology, as exemplified by these cringe-worthy digg comments on mogilefs. And we all thought slashdot was bad!
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