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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Newbies welcome, or not?
Jared,
Well said and Agreed. At the end of the day, it is all relative. If some of us feel that newbies are asking silly questions, then are acknowledged experts like Jonathan Lewis or Steve Adams justified in feeling that OUR questions don't make the cut, either?
It is better to point people at documentation or refuse to answer instead of deliberately misleading them. Even if people have the sense to not use the misleading material, it will just annoy them to read a response that is not helpful, especially when they are trying to resolve an issue.
Cheers,
Vasan.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jared.Still_at_radisys.com [mailto:Jared.Still_at_radisys.com]
Sent: 28 June 2004 19:21
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Newbies welcome, or not?
>
> ANYBODY who would type ANYTHING in as root WITHOUT knowing what it
> does EXACTALLY should not have root access, is not responsable
> enough to have root access and needs to WAKE UP and LEARN the "man"
command.
>
> good lord, people, what happened to personal responsibility and
> professionalism?
>
It would seem that many of us have forgotten that Scott Adams gets
fodder for Dilbert from real life.
As Mark Powell has pointed out, folks get thrown into the position of DBA and/or Unix admin without much prior experience, and they don't have much say in the matter, short of finding new employment. That is not always an option. They may not yet have a good concept of how unix works, and don't yet appreciate the power of root.
So, are we saying we should not answer newbie questions for folks that don't have a clue, and yet they are required to fill the position?
Even pointing someone to the correct section of the documentation can be extremely useful. I started with Oracle 7.0.12. The documentation was quite a bit smaller than now, but it wasn't always clear which doc I needed.
The docs are now 20k+ pages for all the Oracle online docs. The index and search capabilities are useful, but hardly infallible. Is it too much trouble for us to point someone in the right direction?
How about the less experienced listers? I often ignore simple questions, knowing that this gives an opportunity for junior folks to participate in the list, and help out those that have even less experience than they do.
So, what's the consensus?
Should be welcome folks with little experience, or make it clear that they should come back when they know what they're doing?
My vote is for trying to be helpful, even to those with annoyingly simple questions. If I don't care to answer, I leave it for someone else.
Jared
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