The Water Cooler

Q: Is it better to be completely shaven or have slight facial hair to show some maturity, for an interview?

Close votes please:

1

I know this sounds strange but should a man be 100% clean shaven for an interview? I look young when I have no facial hair. I was thinking to use a manual razor and get a close shave the day before. Have there been any studies done on the subject of grooming for an interview? I defiantly don't h...

professionalism interviewing dress-code

Hey user, and welcome back to The Workplace! As explained in our help center, "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site" -- whether or not stubble is good/bad/otherwise is going to depend on the person, the position, and the type of stubble. On the other hand, if you made an edit to ask, "How can I appear older during an interview?" it may be a good question that can definitely be answered and will be useful to people visiting in the future. Thanks in advance! — jmac 8 secs ago

18

A: How can I communicate better with co-worker that is not a good listener

This is going to be a long answer because you have a really complicated situation. Background I ended the call saying that I won't talk him again if he won't listen to me and that he is disrespectful. I decided there is no point to talk on the phone with him. I tried to communicate...

Charles Dickens was paid by the word. In the web 2.0 era, @enderland is paid by the bullet point.

12:46 AM

@jmac I don't know if I agree it should be close. I agree it should be edited, but it's the kind of question I wish we really could answer.

I don't think it's the same question as "How can I appear older during an interview?"

@NickC We get a lot of questions like this. "Should I wear the red tie or the blue tie to an interview?" or "Should I hide my tattoo during an interview?" etc.

These questions are less than ideal because they are asking people to 'vote' on their preferred appearance, rather than actually explaining how to decide which is the right choice.

(because I guarantee you that my job in manufacturing in japan will have a very different answer from an IT company in New York, or a Law Firm in London, etc.)

good point, but I think you've touched on a slight difference from your suggested alternate question.

(let's leave aside the localization question -- I think it's plenty OK to say "in the US..." or even "in New York...")

asking "How do I decide if it's ok to..." is slightly different than "How do I appear older?"

I think the first is closer to the true intent of the asker.

I tend to disagree with localization, only because I don't want 300 questions about whether or not stubble is good in the food industry in New York, or public service in Tokyo, or diplomats in Shanghai, etc.

IMHO I don't see why it wouldn't be OK, as long as the cross-section of the population is large enough.

otherwise we risk trying to be too broad and satisfying ourselves -- "Yep, we've answered that one!" -- but not really answering the question for our future visitors.

Yes, but setting that aside for a moment, I would much prefer, "How do I seem older in an interview?" because it not only covers stubble, but also other methods to solve the underlying problem (seeming young/immature) that the asker wants to solve.

12:54 AM

I can see your point, but I think if you made an analogy to StackOverflow, the original would fly. People don't always ask their original problem, they very frequently ask about details of a specific implementation path they've already chosen.

I also think that would have longer-lasting answers, since facial hair (and perceptions of it) change really quickly.

Yeah, but we're not Stack Overflow

I really strongly feel that we need to be a better resource than Stack Overflow with even higher quality questions because of our subject matter and the lack of an ability to check answers by compiling and running them

I mean, we could just give a quick answer saying, "It depends on your business/industry, but generally speaking stubble won't be a plus", which is what the current ones do, but that says to everyone who reads it, "This is a site where sharing your personal opinion is a-okay!", and it isn't.

@jmac My point is why try to be so general? I don't disagree that your suggestion is a good question, I'm just not sure it answers the user's question.

@jmac We could, but are you sure that a bad example answer is an argument against the question?

Sometimes it is, but I'm not sure it is.

I'll get back to you, have to do something else for a while.

(short version: general questions are easier to answer with why and how explanations than short 'which is better?' questions which encourage sharing opinion over reasoning. Specific questions need to be even better scoped to prevent that, otherwise question and answer quality drops)

1:42 AM

@jmac The thing that really speaks to me about these kinds of questions is, well, the asker isn't just looking for unsubstantiated opinion. In this case, the answer to the question requires backing with solid research.

This gives us that opportunity to use information based on actual science (assuming behavioral psychology and workplace psychology is a science...)

2:14 AM

@jmort253 When trying to figure out how an interviewer will react to physical appearance, there just isn't going to be a useful 'official' answer based on science. Let's say I conduct a study where I go to job interviews both with and without stubble. I would have to account for too many separate variables (like skill, interview content, market demand, etc.) to control for the effect of stubble.

@jmac Before closing this one on that basis alone, I'd be likely to do a search first, just to see if there really is research that could apply to the situation....

not saying there isn't other reasons to close that though.... honestly, I've only had time to take a quick glance at it... so take that with the usual grain of salt :)

I understand that the asker wants a definitive, "This will help you" or "This won't help you", but such a thing won't exist. Even if I could control for all those variables, and came away with, "Having stubble will increase your chances of getting the job by 4.7%, ±2% sampling error" that doesn't mean that having stubble when attending that specific job interview will be the right choice.

I would much rather have a question asking how to appear more mature (if that is the goal of the stubble), as that allows people to take from a broader base of knowledge and come up with better ways to tackle the question than just looking for studies on beard growth and effect on interview success

Hi @enderland, didn't see your message till now. I've been popping in and out of chat, though I haven't been too active.

@panoptical Welcome to The Workplace! I'm guessing enderland is asleep at the moment, but he'll read it when he wakes up I'm sure.

Thanks @jmac, and I'm sure he'll get the notification. :)

2:22 AM

Yeah, those @pings are very useful that way. Plus it's generally quite quiet around this time as the US goes to sleep, and Europe is already asleep.

@jmort253 Another point. Assuming that the goal is to find research, then I would hope that the question would be scoped quite a bit better. What is 'one day of stubble' for someone who looks young? Questions that have the potential for people making answers like, "As long as it's well-kept, I think beards in the workplace are accepted. You can't expect to go in with a month of uncontrolled growth, though." need to be held to a higher standard or else our quality will suffer as a result

(I realize that answer has downvotes, and that's great and all, but unless we can prevent people from adding those sorts of answers, we need to be very careful with questions like this. I would rather have it put on hold, clarified, edited, and then reopened than have it collect answers like that until someone can google about stubble's impact on getting job offers)

That's too bad. I really can't be too active during the day, as that's when I work... :/

@jmac Yeh, ok... just now read the answers...

It has such potential too....

And is this discussion regarding workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/22307/…

@panoptical Yeah, that's the question we're talking about.

And don't worry about when you're active, we have people from all around the world here, so no matter when you're active, you'll likely find someone around.

(I have the graveyard shift. I drew the short straw. @jmort is a slave-driver of a moderator when it comes to community moderation scheduling)

2

2:30 AM

@jmort253 lol

so true too....

So your beard is an indication of gainful employment @jmort?

absolutely

I am the exact opposite. When on vacation and/or taking a break from the employment game, I grow a beard. When at work, I look professional.

I think I've come in with a beard once in my storied career as an international man of mystery. Had a three week vacation, didn't shave, forgot to shave before my first day back at work, and made the office nervous. Japan is a pretty clean-shaven country, and even though beards are acceptable, very few people can grow a proper one.

@jmac too bad I'm paid $0/bullet point..... :(

@panoptical no worries :)

2:35 AM

@enderland I am sure you got 1 rep/bullet point. That's like being paid. I will make sure Shog credits your account with unicoins as compensation as well

►

Watch the next 2 minutes of this....

@jmac I think so? I did hit rep cap yesterday so maybe not.... :\ tyrants at SE, stealin' my bullets

@jmort253 will take a look at it later.

Great talk, actually, if you all have time to watch from the beginning...

@enderland I still can't believe that this question got as much attention as it did, or that the top answer really got 100 votes. Ouch.

It capped my rep for two days straight, and it's still trickling in.

2:38 AM

@jmac I've given up trying to understand or rationalize why some answers like that get 100 votes...

@jmac I'm still trying to rationalize how many answers seem to get 100+ votes like that :P

@enderland Yeah. I mean. I get it. They see the question, click, see someone saying, "no", upvote, move on.

I think the trick is having a short enough answer to digest quickly and get "ahah! I agree!"

also I want everyone on this site to vote to close more, especially for unclear questions

@panoptical The questions appear on here, lots of people visit our site as a result.

I see. It's just that I've seen great answers get only 3-4 votes, while other great answers go over the 50 or even 100 vote mark.

2:41 AM

A very hot question will get 50k views in a week from the list. Like this one. Over 250 votes. 50k views. And the only views it will likely get in the future are from people browsing the highest voted posts.

@panoptical I always try to upvote posts like that, it's weird, ones on internship generally don't get much votes either....

basically, what happens is that the question gets hot, and answers that were there and at the top early get unnaturally bumped as a result. If you are even 3 hours late to the party, a great answer can be at 1/10th of the top answer just due to visibility for people with short attention spans.

It's not that big of a deal though. Long-term, quality will rise to the top. Questions that are accessible from Google will continue getting upvotes for the forseeable future.

Our most viewed question is this one:

@jmac I've been getting more and more random rep upvotes, not sure if it's from google or people browing my user page?

Q: How Should I Indicate Language Proficiency on my Resume?

32

Question: What are some good ways of listing language proficiency on a resume? Problem: Language is such a complex thing to explain simply. There are several aspects of most languages (reading, writing, speaking, listening), and being good at one aspect doesn't mean you'll be good at the rest....

resume skills

@enderland Depends on the question. Open a private browsing session, type some keywords related to the question, and see if The Workplace pops up on the first page.

@jmac workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/10006/…

lol some of those deleted answers are great

2:45 AM

My question above comes up in the top 3 on the major search engines.

@jmac, that's quite the large bounty you offered to boot

@panoptical That was after the fact just to give a nice thanks to jcmeloni (twice) for that awesome answer.

11 OFFERED BOUNTIES FOR 800 REPUTATION

I've only put 800 rep out in bounties? huh

That question has really helped draw people to our site. And that's good.

heh you've put a lot more rep out there than me but I"ve done it a lot more ;)

4 OFFERED BOUNTIES FOR 1,550 REPUTATION

anyways, I'm out for a bit, later folks!

2:47 AM

6-8 months ago, that question wasn't even the highest viewed. It's gotten 50,000 visitors to our site in half a year. That's great for a question that wasn't on the hot list.

This question is similar too. It will continue to get more views going forward.

Q: What is appropriate email follow-up etiquette after no response?

18

Sometimes I send emails and need a response. While not quite as bad as not being able to find denvercoder9, it sometimes happens I get no response. This presents a problem if the request is something relatively important to my work or my manager requested the contact in the first place. My ques...

communication email follow-up

only about 40k so far

@enderland We really need to figure out which questions are good like that, and attracting googlers.

Is there a way to do that via the mod tools @jmort?

you can probably write a data.SE query and sort based on view count?

@enderland Tried it, but it pops up mostly hot questions.

The issue is that lots of views over a short time = hot questions. Lots of views period = hot questions.

You can do it with advanced search too. For instance, all questions over 50,000 views

3:14 AM

@jmac Not really.... as far as per question, we really just have the # views that you see to the right of each question on the question page.

the best thing to do to draw more outside attention is to share interesting questions via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.

On smaller sites, I see a difference in the number of views on questions I share vs questions I don't share.

Especially Reddit.

I'd be interested to see if anyone has success on other sites, like digg or delicious... I don't participate on those so don't quite know how well sharing links works....

3:40 AM

http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/22318/how-to-add-task-improvement-efficiency-in-a-resume
Too subjective to be able to answer?

3:52 AM

@jmort253 I sense a query for the community team then.

@panoptical Fully agreed.

Hey Wilo, and welcome to The Workplace. As explained in our help center, "Questions looking for opinions on what to do but with no specific problem are suited for discussion boards (not a question/answer site) and generally will be closed on The Workplace as 'primarily opinion-based.'" Each approach will have pros and cons depending on the job you're applying to and what you want to highlight. You can try to edit your question explaining why you have a problem with your current approach, and may get better answers explaining how to improve it. Thanks in advance! — jmac 17 secs ago

5:01 AM

artofmanliness.com/2014/03/25/facial-hair-signal

5:11 AM

Fun for the whole water cooler: query showing badge count by user

5:42 AM

nbcmiami.com/news/business/…

6:29 AM

An even better version of the badge query, thanks to Jason C!

7:50 AM

@PaulDonny Can I suggest just dropping it completely and moving on with business then? It takes two to tango, and all that. While I can't guarantee it, I would place a reasonable wager that neither Chad nor enderland would continue the discussion if you didn't, and if that's the resolution you want, that would seem to be the easiest way to get it.

@CMW I'm glad you like doing it -- the best communities are filled with people who tackle all the various tasks happily. Joe seems to do a great job answering, you are dynamite on the queues, @Rhys did his magic with tags, and others with scoping the site and commenting and editing, etc. No matter what happens in the election, I hope you'll stick around and keep it up!

@RhysW Have you prepared your acceptance/concession meta posts? 12 hours to go. Get those speechwriters (errr, meta posters?) cracking!

@jmac Should I get elected, I only expect to have even more queues to play with :D

@CMW There are two types of mods, or so the thinking goes: janitors and exception handlers. Some people are good at keeping the floors tidy, and some are more hands-off and handle the exceptional, "Cleanup on aisle 5!" after a customer goes in to labor in an inconvenient location and the like. We need both.

I'm curious how it all turns out and who becomes what :)

@CMW I believe that 3 of us will become ♦, and 3 of us won't. But who knows, maybe one of us will get promoted to Chief Astronaut. It could happen.

Well that would be awesome :D

I was talking about the parts ofthe cleaning crew tho

8:05 AM

Ah, I don't think anyone gets assigned roles, though I'm not privvy to the inner workings of the moderation brotherhood.

First question post-election, "Should I include moderating a Stack Exchange site on my resume?"

probably bad language-ing on my part. Should have been "I'm curious as to who turns out to be which of those"

Yeah, you're right -- that wasn't one of the questions in the nominee questionnaire.

Michael Grubey

@jmort253 This is a brilliant read...

@CMW My guess. Janitors: CMW, Rhys, Jim. Exception Handlers: Monica, jmort, me

(okay, I didn't actually guess about me, but from my flagging history and general review history, you can probably figure out that I don't spend an exorbitant amount of time in the review mines)

^^

may be about right

8:09 AM

I'm up in the air about Monica. She flags/reviews quite a lot, but she seems to describe herself as an exception handler.

9:57 AM

...how would one call that funny pattern when outsider votes drag post from - to +? What about vote raping? Happened 147 times, nothing to worry about? Occurs maybe once in 2-3 days average, not frequent enough to worry about? — gnat 2 hours ago

For what it's worth, @Katherine, the whole "outsider votes overwhelm the norms of the site" thing is mostly a myth - just like that thing about lemmings and cliffs... — Shog9 ♦ 2 days ago

^^^ myth, yeah sure

10:37 AM

^^^-.-

@CMW I guess he thinks of himself as a father of a boy named Sue...

►

And he said: "Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye

haha :D nice

RhysW

12:34 PM

@jmac 'roles' and 'times' aren't enforced by anyone, if the mods agree with eachother to do it a certain way though then i guess thats the exception

@jmac and you can easily guess that im the opposite :P though your amount of edits counts as janitorial too don't forget

When we were at school, our games were simple.
I played a janitor, you played a monitor.

My brain hurts

too much music, paul?

Well, not too much yet. I have 8 days left with my current company and I decide to completely overhaul a project I spent about 4 months working as a side project

It's a Restful API harness for an API

12:49 PM

sounds like a good idea. what flavor is the original API?

Just a basic SOAP API

I am essentially trying to convert it over to easily be able to accept an HTML interface, a 'Property' file style just load and go interface and the ability to load or export SoapUI project files into it

and that makes your brain hurt?

I am not a developer

are there tons of resources?

oh

oooh

ok, then I understand :D

I am SQA

12:54 PM

now I have no idea what that is

Quality Assurance

soda quality administrator guessing

almost!

then this is an ambitions feat for the last couple days

And no, no resources

@NewWorld I believe the "has no authority" part is irrelevant. To refuse to be yelled at is okay in any case. And I don't recognize the fault of the OP either. — constantius 7 mins ago

I think these people are missing the fact that the OP's boss specifically told him to work out things with the employee in question...

@PaulDonny resources in the sense of REST, I mean

12:58 PM

Yeah I guess, I am still pretty new with REST and trying to just cram through it as quickly as possible right now. I have made one other REST API (Friday) that just checked all (or selected) endpoints at my company

1:22 PM

> Never mind the negative votes you receive for asking a honest question, probably most of those who voted you down probably do it themselves and are probably uncomfortable admitting it...

^^^ some answers are so... lovely workplace.stackexchange.com/a/22329/168

1:34 PM

is de-emphasize really the opposite of emphasize?

that or downplay

... is the suspense killing anyone else?

It will kill me later. on my couch.

@Chad not really at all, other than you folks making a big deal of it I wouldn't care at all

that or the greasy chips

:D

A: How can I communicate better with a co-worker that is not a good listener?

I want to edit this answer:

25

This is going to be a long answer because you have a really complicated situation. Background I ended the call saying that I won't talk him again if he won't listen to me and that he is disrespectful. I decided there is no point to talk on the phone with him. I tried to communicate...

to basically say, "he's clearly a jerk, you should just ignore him and if your supervisor complains you aren't trying to work with him say - you try to work with him!"

I wish I could work in the fantasy land where you can ignore what your boss tells you and simply blow off all difficult people :(

1:39 PM

@DJClayworth got a minute to discuss your question in chat?

> There are only 200 easy [astronomy] questions, and they've all been asked 100 times on every other site on the subject. But there are 20,000,000 detailed, difficult, long-tail questions that only an expert can answer, and we'd be doing a REAL service to the Internet by creating a place where you can find answers to the 20,000,000 hard questions, not the 200 easy ones.

Great article from Joel Spolsky on how Stack Exchange works really well for answering the long-tail problems on a topic: joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/04/19.html

Q: How can women avoid de-emphasising their skills?

0

During interviews, women tend to play down the proficiency at skills they have, and they make a big point of what they may lack. How can someone circumvent that? Note: This question was asked on a proposal for a new site "Women in Technology". Some voters thought this would be more appropriate a...

interviewing women

The question of the day is, what is "the long tail" on The Workplace SE...

I really like the core question here, but without the OP I think it's very hard to salvage

@jmort253 That is kind of a personal question dont you think?

1:46 PM

@jmort253 idk, I think it's more, "do we want to encourage long tail answers" or not

@enderland me either really just trying to stir the pot a bit... guess im just in that mood :p

Yeh, it's just something I've been thinking about for awhile... I remembered reading that article and just happen to stumble upon it again.

our problem isn't getting complicated questions

it's getting good comprehensive answers to those questions

@jmort253 I like long tail questions our problem is that we have 3 or 4 users that will post answers like "I Dont really know anything about X but here is my opinion" then a few new users pile on and we quickly end up with 6-10 answers that are essentially useless.

Yes we want to encourage long tail. And long tail in the workplace are related to local standards, certification, and regulation in various industries. I would love to see questions about, "Massage therapist certification in Huntsville, AL" or "What degree is required to teach English as a foreign language in Taiwan?" etc.

1:48 PM

That kind of noise drowns out the good long tail answers

especially since the good answers take 30-60 min or more to write

Well-scoped practical questions that can be solved without being a lawyer and by digging through available resources.

Sorry to drop that on you all and run.... but work calls. :) Have a great day!

A: My non-EU husband working in Ireland

I have been diddling with trying to make similar answers on expats:

6

Make sure your marriage is legal in the country you were married Get a copy of your marriage certificate Move to Ireland and have your spouse apply for a Residence Card Make sure your marriage is legal While Ireland will recognize a marriage conducted overseas, it needs to be a legally valid ...

@jmort253 You are just trying to get us talking about something constructive instead of pointless banter... i have your game :p

A: Moving to Germany, working remotely for company in US. What sort of visa do I need to stay?

4

The EU Treaty Article 39 covers the freedom of movement of workers, etc. for member states. The treaty says that each country has to establish laws allowing EU citizens to move around the EU with their family members. One of the stipulations is that this has to not only covered registered spouses...

1:50 PM

idk part of me wants to just start spamming mediocre answers everywhere which are "Feel good" types of answers

@enderland I would post the same comments on your crap answers i do on everyone elses

We have had quite a few questions on how freelancers should determine their pay, or various things tangentially involving tax regulations, and I think these are great answers that share info experts know, and normal folk can't spout off about.

@Chad it's ok, I'd get enough upvotes to make it worthwhile from a rep perspective

Q: How Should I Indicate Language Proficiency on my Resume?

Concrete questions work well here, and get a lot of hits from the interweb. Case in point:

32

Question: What are some good ways of listing language proficiency on a resume? Problem: Language is such a complex thing to explain simply. There are several aspects of most languages (reading, writing, speaking, listening), and being good at one aspect doesn't mean you'll be good at the rest....

resume skills

There is a saturation point where our experts will get sick of answering questions in the form of, "Why am I awesome and everyone around me sucks?"

problem is, everyone thinks they are experts here (including us, to some extent)

1:53 PM

(I know some would say we're already there, but I think things will come to a head and we'll hit rock bottom at some point depending on growth rates and how active people are in community moderation)

@jmac this is one reason I didn't want to run for mod, I don't want the burden of dealing with mediocre answers becoming community standards

Of course. We all like answering some of the 'soft' questions that require a modicum of common sense and a way with words. And that's fine. If the question is well-scoped and we provide useful answers, then it's fine to have those questions around so well as we take the time to make sure some of the not-so-great content that tags along for the ride is managed.

But long-term, we need to encourage the harder questions, and get the community of experts focused on the questions that will have long-term value, and not the short-term flashes in the pan that come from time to time from somewhere or another on the network.

@jmac I think we have plenty of harder questions actually, it's just there is so much noise from "here's my thoughts!" that they are impossible to recognize

(I am still playing around with the data explorer and trying to figure out the best way to find those sorts of questions -- if we can create a great meta compilation of the long-tail questions that we have, we can focus on improving them and creating a great resource, and having something to point new folks to as an example of what our community is)

Q: How can I communicate better with a co-worker that is not a good listener?

21

I've been working as a full-time software engineer in a company for more than a year and this is my first job. I have been working alone on a large scale maintaining project and there is a project manager beside me. Three months ago, the company hired an old employer who retired several years ag...

communication colleagues time-management

1:56 PM

@enderland Point out 3 from this year?

I think this is a GREAT question but, none of the answers really address the depth the question has

it's all just "oh woe is you" types of answers

it's a perfect exmple of what this site has as a serious problem: good, challenging, involved questions and lots of mediocre ho hom answers

What makes it a great question?

@jmac it's not an easy question

> There are only 200 easy law questions, and they've all been asked 100 times on Mahalo and Yahoo!Answers. But there are 20,000,000 detailed, difficult, long-tail questions that only professionals can answer, and we'd be doing a REAL service to the Internet by creating a place where you can find answers to the 20,000,000 hard questions, not the 200 easy ones.”

(seriously asking, I voted it down because I don't think it's well-scoped as is often the case when the question is long and seems more like grasping for the right question than scoping the question to make a good answer easy)

the problem though is workplace doesn't require a law degree or any sort of background

@jmac it's actually annoying to me too, because the asker has changed facts from the question, meh

1:59 PM

I don't think it's about certification, nor do I think that being a professional programmer lends any credence to your SO answers. What matters is that the answers provided work and that they explain why they work.

@jmac you say this like it's common sense, but it's very clear most people answering here don't agree with this in action

The issue is that the questions are usually bad. That's why editing is so important. The topic that question asks about could be tremendous, but the person asking it clearly has a grudge and isn't asking what it should ask to get great answers.

hrmm, I think you are convincing me of this - it's rather a feel good "tell me what I want to hear" type thing, the more I read it

Imagine if that question was, "I am a young employee working alone in a company doing stuff. A recently retired employee with far more experience has been taken in as an advisor and assigned to work with me, but I am intimidated by his experience and don't know how to have a mutually productive relationship. How can I discuss this with him to have both of us come out of this better off?"

@enderland We need to start encouraging people not to answer questions if they are not good answers

2:03 PM

Because to me, that is what the real issue is when I read it. You have a young person who thinks that they are better than they are, and don't have the experience or confidence to address the actual issue without sacrificing their ego to the mercy of the internet (or TWP, in this case)

And personally I would love to hear about how to work with older people in a way that lets you use your skills, and allows you to learn from their experience. And I'll bet you it's something that thousands of people are looking for a solution to every month.

I would rather have unanswered hard questions than hard questions that have 10 horrible answers so the people who can write the good answers just ignore it thinking that out of 10 1 must be decent

@jmac I think a more fundamnetal problem with that question than anything else is a lot of the problems here are mostly perception problems and communication problems, but part of the resolution to them requires looking and reflecting on, "what am I doing that is perceived wrong?"

@enderland And that's why I say it's a bad question. It's like coding questions on SO where it's clear the person asking hasn't bothered to debug their own problem first.

I am guilty of it too, but a lot of our answers start by explaining to the asker what they should have been asking in the first place, but that does not create a good resource or scalable answers.

workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/22270/…

I don't think the solution is to delete your answer there. It is a good answer, and I think it should stay

we aren't going to somehow magically improve site quality by deleting our answers where we did bad things one at a time

we are going to improve it by being more aggressive about recognizing the shortcoming of questions, and working hard at commenting, closing, and editing as need be to make sure that the questions are good.

2:07 PM

@jmac no but all of the other answers should be deleted

this feels hopeless, honestly. I've been doing that a long time

literally all of the others

The other answers should be downvoted and commented. Or preferably, the question gets closed as 'unclear what you're asking' with a comment to the author explaining why.

Maybe the asker is happy with the current answers. And that's fine.

@jmac I don't care if the asker is satisfied though, I care about future users

Or maybe he thinks about it and realizes, "Hey, you're right, I could have asked that better" and gives us a better one next time.

A: What is the incentive to accept answers now? Should we have one?

2:08 PM

11

As someone who frequently finds Stack Exchange answers via Google, this is a huge issue for me personally (and I suspect anyone else who regularly is finding Stack Exchange threads for questions). My workflow is: Check thread and see if question is same (via error message, etc) Check answers. ...

@enderland I do too, but the point is that for the sake of future users we shouldn't worry about the reaction of that one user if our overall goal is noble.

And I think that part of the issue for us post-graduation is that our question volume per day is definitely increasing.

@jmac huh, I guess that's a good perspective I should take more often

We screw up. It's part of the learning process.

We upvote stuff we shouldn't, answer others we shouldn't, and sometimes we downvote or close otherwise good content.

Actually I think we should have a new 20k ability... the experts pick where experts can vote to accept an answer.

And rather than beating ourselves up about screwing up and trying to prevent the screwups, we should focus on what will work to improve quality in the future since we will never stop screwing up.

2:11 PM

So you would have the Users pick and the answer the experts (those people with 20k rep anyway) think is the right answer

We have the benefit of seeing what happened with SO. SO does not suffer from a lack of questions. We shouldn't worry about the amount of mistakes or disgruntled users who get mixed messages, but focus on getting a higher quality signal (and clearer signal to users) in the future, using those mistakes as a guide.

@jmac And the scope of our site makes it so that we can expect that at some point we should eclipse the traffic of SO if we are good enough

@Chad Bingo. So while we've been spending all this time pre-graduation worrying about getting enough content, now we have to think longer-term about creating a higher ratio of good to bad content to maintain our signal

The 3000 questions we already created aren't going away, and will continue to help people. Well, some of them. Just look at questions from the early days of SO. What SO did right was figuring out what types of questions scale, and how to allow the community to make sure those were the types of questions that won-out in the long run.

Q: Auto-protect questions that get more than N answers from new users in a 24-hour period

23

Expanding the criteria for auto-protection has been discussed in the past: Should we automatically protect all questions with more than N answers? But I think that discussion addresses the wrong problem: Protecting a question with a large number of answers doesn't do anything to fix the probl...

feature-request status-completed new-users protected-questions

^^^ status-completed. 3 lemming answers in 24 hours will trigger this protection

Look at our questions per day:

data.stackexchange.com/workplace/revision/181714/233733/#graph

Our questions per day have really increased since graduation.

We took a hit to privileges, we got a lot of new users wandering in because of our fancy favicon, and all that normal growth that we were getting as well.

Look at our traffic as well: quantcast.com/workplace.stackexchange.com

More traffic + more questions + fewer privileges = temporary feeling of having no positive impact

but it's only temporary -- it won't last. Our privileges will grow, we will have more moderators in about 8 hours (or, errr, well, technically the same amount, but perhaps slightly more active and motivated ones?), and we will figure out how to manage the content and weather the current storm and come out stronger for it.

2:21 PM

@jmac yup, it's going to get better over time. However, my experience at Programmers rather shows that over-exposure at the hot list hurts even a mature site

@gnat I think the hot list would hurt us a lot less if we were better about commenting/editing/closing questions that are new. I think a lot of the time we are reactive about it (at least, I feel like I've been able to dodge some bullets with a quick comment and downvote within the first hour after the question was posted)

And we don't need fancy 3k users to do that. We need people with 150 rep or whatever it takes to downvote saying, "Hey, this question would be best answered with another question, or by prefacing it with 'assuming that...' -- maybe I should add a comment and downvote!" and the hot question problem (for some of the worst offenders) would quickly disappear.

@jmac that's certainly true, and that's about how these are dealt with at Programmers. Still, there's quite some pain involved even there. Hope auto-protection will make it easier to deal with (as already been the case with shuffling)

Or at least lessen at any rate. Shog was right when he said that poor questions beget poor answers, and that it's usually not the fault of answers. Don't get me wrong, we have some absolutely atrocious answers on otherwise good questions (I will refer again here for the 10k'ers), but a lot of the bad answers are on bad questions.

@jmac I agree its time to stop worrying about chasing a few users away. We need to take an axe to some of their bad answers, and especially the new ones posted that are not in compliance with site rules. Start making them flag to have them undeleted instead of giving them time to edit until they show they can post good content that meets standards

2

And a lot of the bad questions are not bad in the sense of being unsalvageable, but bad in the sense that they need a bit of tough love and someone to put the time in to actually saving it (or giving the asker the ability to save it themselves). And that's the hard part -- we see so many horrendous questions that are clearly not a fit that we don't want to lose the ones we see potential in

3

but if we want to have good content long-term, we need to be even more vigilant about the almost great questions, because those are the ones that will shape our community and our visitors moving forward. Nobody is going to look at the really bad ones.

I mean, I encourage people editing and all, but I don't think this question has much of a chance of being saved because the original is so far off what works here

2:27 PM

@jmac Very valid point, build up flagship questions. Will also make it easier to demo how a question should look

@Chad I think we (as a community) need to downvote and delete poor answers and not feel bad about it. We have those tools for a reason. And if we have people posting about it on Meta, it is even better -- it will help create a productive dialogue between people who want to improve, and the community who wants to help them.

@jmac The problem is we have a few users that post stupid crap that gets upvotes... and I do not for the life of me understand why

(on the other hand, I am much more reluctant to have mods stepping in and deleting things willy-nilly, because that just passes the buck from the community to the mods and should be the exception not the norm)

we can not vote to delte an answer that is positivly scored

or I would

Q: Let's get rid of the 10K flag queue

@Chad We should be able to in the near future (if we can't already).

77

The 10K tools are pretty cool... You get a birds-eye view of activity on the site, a "dashboard" view of what's happening. Some of the individual tools haven't scaled particularly well with Stack Overflow's growth, but the concept behind them is still sound: we trust you to enough to be a bee wat...

feature-request review moderator-tools 10k-tools flag-queue

I am all for getting rid of bad answers, and I think this will help. Rather than having us struggle with the stupid flag queue (which we seem to have given up on because it doesn't really work), we would be able to flag things to send them to the queue, which is way way better.

Even positively scored answers.

2:32 PM

still limited to scores <= 0

Nope!

that is how i read proposed changes

Q: Should I apologize for not attending a 15 min meeting?

Wait, yes, you're right.

Shog has lied to me!

@Shog, sorry, looks like I hadn't read your question properly. So now, any flag we raise will send the post to the 'Low Quality' queue and will need to be reviewed regardless of score. Regardless of score, we will be able to vote to delete (or 'recommend deletion'). That's cool with me, and makes a lot of sense. This actually will really improve the workflow as well (and allow more people to act on bad answers if we educate them). Thanks for the clarification. — jmac Mar 21 at 2:03

If they don't implement that part, it will just make me sad.

(well, not sad, just motivated to get them to flip the switch for The Workplace to see how it work here)

All I'm trying to say here is:
1. Often the issue is in the question, so we should be more vigilant about questions (especially the almost-good ones)
2. We shouldn't feel guilty about using the tools at our disposal to deal with poor content on the site (downvoting, closing, deleting, flagging, commenting, editing) so long as we do it to improve the quality of the site
3. Right now we're getting more posts per day, and have fewer privileges to deal with them. This will improve in the long term.

@PaulDonny Sorry, didn't mean to miss this. Tunnel-visioned a bit there. We actually have quite a few resources on how to ask questions scattered throughout meta.

See, this is one of those questions that will cause us grief:

-1

I am an intern at a software company, I came late today and couldnt attend a daily 15 min meeting. Should I apologize or just let it go?

professionalism internship meetings work-time

just noticed in comments of that auto-protect MSO post, Workplace leads by example:

This is already happening on Math Educators in the 2 days its been public. It's very similar to The Workplace, because every single person on Stack Exchange took math in middle school/high school and has their own opinion. Could we get some of the other features The Workplace has as well? (someone mentioned 15 answers -> CW). — Brian Rushton Mar 26 at 18:04

^^^ feel sorta proud

The core is good. "When should I apologize for not attending a meeting?" is a great question. "Should I, as an intern, apologize for missing an unspecified 15 minute meeting?" is a total crapshoot where we can never give a good answer.

2:40 PM

@jmac Yeah, I am tunnel-visioned too right now. Always fun

Hey Conrad, and welcome to The Workplace! I am going to make an edit to your post to get it better answers. As explained in Good Subjective, Bad Subjective, Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. If you think I botched it, or that the answer won't help you out, please feel free to add an edit of your own. Thanks in advance! — jmac 2 mins ago

Two horrible answers to the question in the 20 minutes since it was asked. So I just edited it to make answering it more difficult.

Comments are really starting to get out of control:-/

Took me a whopping 5 minutes to do.

Let's see how the quality of the answers improves in the future.

Q: Interviewee's won't show up for personal or face to face round of Interview

0

I am working in a consultancy or agency in which we will catch a client and get a job description. After that I clearly read the description and search for the candidates in job portals. I call the candidate, explain to him about the company and designation along with job description. After such ...

interviewing job-search hiring-process recruitment consultants

This is a specific job skill question (recruiter) but also a general HR quesiton...

My gut says it should be off topic

For reference, here are the first two answers, verbatim: #1, If it was just a Jour-fixe or so that you missed, I would rather keep it as a comment during coffee break or so. Over-apologizing may only bite you back there

#2, Without a doubt, yes. You don't need to make a big deal about it, but you should absolutely speak to the organiser and extend your apology. You should ask if there's anything important you missed.

Hey Dan, the best answers here are longer rather than shorter, are backed up with experience, and explain why and how the answer is correct. Any chance you could edit your question to add a bit more meat to it? You'd likely get a better reception. Thanks in advance! — jmac 1 min ago

2:50 PM

@jmac Is the answer to that question going to be helpful to anyone in the future? I would almost rather have the question of I was late getting in this morning and missed our daily meeting with is the professional way to handle this.

Q: How to handle and recover from a scorching work burn out?

@Chad, while your answer is good to this question, the question itself could be scoped a bit better to be a good question.

-1

I have reached a stage where I am so depressed and stressed that I am not thinking clear anymore and don't want to work. I actually took a two-week holiday to try and free myself but I still feel stressed, even more worried about what's going on in the office, the politics, my future and growth o...

career-development burnout

@jmac no arguements there.

@Chad If the answer to that question doesn't explain how to determine whether to apologize for missing the morning meeting, it is a bad answer.

@jmac Unless apologizing is the wrong tactic to take. I think that question is to specific. What should I do is better than yes or do to doing x. I would rather have how do I do X but how do I apologize should be off topic here.

And really, the issue is that none of us know if he should apologize. Do people frequently miss it? Is attendance optional? When he said he was late, does that mean he was later than he intended, or that he was later than the company allows? Was the meeting important? Do other employees apologize when they miss meetings? Who do they apologize to?

2:52 PM

that is a general etiquette question

@jmac exactly. Maybe the question should be how do i figure out the approriate action to take?

Who was holding the meeting? Was it the boss who is also in charge of intern tardiness? Is it a different group? Does it shine a poor light on the boss?

Were you the intended to be the main presenter or the person the meeting was for?>

That's where I'm trying to get the question to go by asking how to determine when to apologize (because sometimes apologizing isn't the right answer).

But yeah, asking, "How do I determine an appropriate response when I miss a meeting?" would be good too

Its gotta be closed too broad right now

Possibly, and I invite you to do so if you think that's the right choice.

(with a comment explaining how to narrow it down or specify it)

2:55 PM

the problem with the edit (before the suck answers are deleted) is that the edit will invalidate those answers

I just don't want TWP to descend to, "Here are the vague details of what happened. Should I do A or B?" even without the second half, I really want to shy away from people dumping a bunch of unfocused detail followed by a semi-vague inquiry. People should think themselves first, figure out what they think the issue is, and then focus on explaining the background to scope that specific issue before asking a clear question.

I voted to close

@Chad I really don't feel bad about invalidating poor answers.

@jmac We were told not to do it. If you get elected then, maybe you can change the rules

@Chad Where is this mystical rule? (I tend to ignore it, always have)

(maybe I am a bad example, but I generally just do what my gut tells me is best for the content of the site. And sometimes that means invalidating answers, or totally changing the content of a question to keep it open. And sometimes the community disagrees, and I'm cool with that too)

A: What went wrong in the question?

3:00 PM

10

As far as the "too broad" issue, I can split the question into multiple smaller question. This statement really stands out to me, because oftentimes hidden beneath the shroud of a really broad question that doesn't fit Stack Exchange is sometimes a series of really great on-topic, constructi...

If we get another question starting with, "How do I deal..." I think it's meta post time

its over and over in meta though. There was a better post ill link it should i find it

Q: Should we have an "agony aunt" tag?

5

I can't help feeling that some of the questions on the site are opportunities to offload to a listening pair of ears (or thousands of pairs of ears as the case may be). I'm thinking in particular of this question: Should I take leave before office function? As Oded says in his comments, and I d...

discussion on-topic-definition tags

I haven't read through the questions, so perhaps they are actually good questions, but every time I see a title like that I just want to say, "Work ain't rainbows and unicorns my friend, you learn how to deal because you aren't always going to get what you want in life, especially when you're getting paid for something."

yesterday, by enderland

I'm not here to make friends with everyone, I'm here to help make Workplace a valuable site. If I stand up for what I believe is required for site quality I'm bound to make enemies through that process and if I spend my entire tenure here trying to appease everyone, well, I'm going to hate this site

3:02 PM

@enderland Bingo.

@jmac Most questions are savable if they get closed or edited before the I have an opinion on your original post answers come in.

@Chad When I edit a post with answers, I usually leave a friendly comment on existing answers saying, "Hey, I changed the post, you may want to take a look"

but once those answers are in (most of the time in 5 min or less any more) we cant.

Maybe we could get a 30-60 minute window where no answers can be posted on questions

And generally the users who care about their content will edit their answers if needed. And if they don't that's fine too. And sometimes they totally delete their answer for whatever reason.

@Chad I'm confused, we most certainly can as I just edited a question with two answers.

@jmac the problem isn't the people who care about their content though....

3:04 PM

Perhaps you mean we shouldn't

@enderland yeah it never has been

lol I love all the haterade I'm getting for that answer on the communication question

I wont how is that

been yelled and and warned about it

@enderland Why are the other ones a problem? If they don't want to fix it, that's their choice. We will always have more users coming in, we need to focus on keeping the right users rather than all users.

2

How successful would SO be if they focused on satisfying the 'homework please' crowd?

@jmac Are we taking volunteers to be kicked out?

3:07 PM

@Chad I don't really know anything about that unless you have a meta link or the like I can read up on it. If you are doing something that improves our content, I can't imagine it being looked down upon, but circumstances can always throw a wrench in that.

@Chad I'm not trying to advocate kicking anyone out, we just realistically will not be able to keep all the users in the all the world happy. Since it's a given we will have some unhappy users, we should focus our effort on making sure that the people who add the most value are the ones that find this a good place.

So if there's a question with two answers that are 100% unsubstantiated opinion and clock in at less than 50 words each, I have absolutely no issue with trying to save the question with an edit after those answers. And if those users get upset (which I hope they won't), we either get to start a discussion on meta, or we may lose their contributions.

And if people miss those contributions, we can have a discussion on why and get everyone figuring out what works, what doesn't, and where we need to work to make our community better in the long run.

At any rate, really sleep time now. Good night, pre-emptive congratulations to the mods-elect, whoever they may be.

@jmac no this was an official email from the workspace moderation team

you will never guess who was instrumental in stoking that fire

A: How can women avoid de-emphasising their skills?

oh my we're getting link-only crap now, just like SO:

-2

This couple of very interesting links might get you started and provide some more good insights on the whole picture: Creating a workplace where women thrive (aka how to create an awesome work environment): https://medium.com/ladybits-on-medium/15fdc11d81ce The Glass Ceiling is Real (But that d...

^^^ "couple of very interesting links might get you started"

3:22 PM

@jmac OK I just want that question delted now

It has 4 negatively scorred answers and not even one of any real quality. I protected it though I dont expect it will actually prevent any more bad answers but maybe it will stop someone

Michael Grubey

@gnat ladybits on medium, is that suitable for work?

Q: When should I apologize for missing a meeting?

Please Burn with fire

1

I am an intern at a software company. I was late coming in to the office today and missed a 15 minute meeting. I am having trouble deciding whether it is appropriate to apologize for missing the meeting, or if that will make a bigger issue out of it and make me worse off for bringing attention to...

professionalism internship meetings work-time

Or at least vote to close

Every bad answer that gets added to this question makes a kitty cry.

I would close this as a medical issue. Anyone agree?

workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/22339/…

@CMW you realize its not an actual burn right? its a mental one

I had a German manager at CAT that knew the secret to avoiding burn out... we regularly went out for beer after work :)

3:37 PM

@Chad burn-outs are always mental. A physical burn-out would be pretty hard to recover from

at least in Germany it's considered a valid medical condition that doctors diagnose you with and that you can be put on medical leave for, for example

I feel like david vs goliath right on workplace

What's happening?

jsut feels like I downvoted a ton of content today