@enderland Glad to hear it enderland -- remember, workplace skills are like languages, if you don't visit the homeland every now and again, you may forget! (this is my oh-so-subtle way of enticing you back in to the fold)

@lorenzog The reality is that comments are a headache like I pointed out in the meta post. Going through each one and determining if it's 'good' or 'bad' is an exercise in futility -- there are too many to take that much time on considering that they are intended to be temporary. I am probably the most aggressive about pruning the entire discussion, unless the comment specifically requests certain clarification from the author. Disagreement or agreement should be votes.

There were also over 10 answers or so at the time, and I figured that if it was important enough, it should be in one of those. That's why we let people edit answers or add their own. When you have 10-15 comments on a single post it greatly detracts from answers themselves since the comments take up more real-estate, and take more time to 'grok' if you're someone wandering in to find an answer to your question.

While it may seem like a poor deal, think of it from the perspective of someone who wandered in here from google looking for an answer that isn't buried in a discussion, and came across those comments. Would those people be better off having them there? I of course invite you to start a meta discussion, but I just wanted to address your concerns personally so you could understand the context.

@jmac Hi, thanks for addressing my concerns. What you say it's true, I might disagree with the aggressive approach but I see where you're coming from and where you want to go. At this point I think the whole problem is beyond this discussion and our collective "powers". And yes, it's true that someone coming in from Google and looking for an answer would be confused, except that in this specific case there is no "answer". Anyhow, thanks again, it's a pleasure to have a civil conversation.

@jmac Hah! I think a lot of this "stuff" is also becoming pretty common sense to me in my daily work

@lorenzog This site has a huge problem in identifying the "q/a site vs discussion board" distinction

@lorenzog I love feedback, and am open to it any time. Comments are a problem, and there are a ton of discussions on meta.SE about how to deal with them (with no good conclusions). I know getting them deleted doesn't feel great, but on the other hand, it doesn't feel great to wade through commentary to get to an answer (the exact problem SE was created to solve, in fact)

@enderland Yeah, my participation here has done beneficial things for my career as well. In totally unforeseen ways from when I started.

@jmac no kidding, it's amazing how much of the "what is an optimal employee like" turns out to actually be true!

@enderland In my case I'll be taking a very unexpected, but very appreciated career shift soon (tm) thanks to what I've learned here.

@jmac geographically? or just internal to your own company?

But yeah, it's amazing what reading about other people's problems teaches you about how to deal with (and avoid) the pitfalls in your own job.

@enderland Geographically? No. Within my own company? No. If this sounds ambiguous, it's intentional, but I promise you'll know when it happens if you stick around.

lol

enderland lurks

pulls out his mIRC manual from 1997

slaps enderland around a bit with a large trout

YES. lol.

Gmail gchat does "/me" as a command

kinda nice

I was trying to teach some coworkers about how to do stuff with data today.

I tried to explain about VBA macros for piecing data together so that they can do it in my absence.

So we got to the "C:\whatever\whatever" portion of a macro that he found over google, and I told him to change it to his directory

He was absolutely baffled, and I didn't understand where the confusion was. "It's a directory, just change the directory" I think

and then after follow-up questions I realized he had never used a computer prior to windows, and the concept of a directory structure in text had never occurred to him, like asking an 8 year-old about film cameras.

I had a similar realization teaching another colleague about dates in Excel being stored as numbers. Totally blank look. Gave a few examples, had them diddle around a bit with them in a workbook, and it was like a light going on.

Using computer prior to the advent of Windows 95 apparently gives you an entirely different perspective on computers that I had (mistakenly) assumed that everyone had.

that pespective is also present in people who use them way after Windows 95 though

(thankfully, not everyone is like me, but you can't blame a guy for assuming as much)

I frequently catch myself assuming too high of a standard for basic computer competence

I realized today, as I was piecing together data from the internet that was at 30 minute intervals over 12 years, that knowing what a command line is, or what a batch file does, really opens up doors.

No kidding

"Have 138 files to rename? No problem. DIR \b *.csv > file.txt and then change the names in Excel and save as a .bat file"

I sent those instructions to my coworker, and it was as if I was an alien from another planet.

hehe

Now this is nothing against my coworker, he is quite bright and can do just about anything he puts his mind to, but the perspective is so different.

A train from 1986 and a train from 2006 leave the station at the same time heading toward a VBA macro. What happens when they try to communicate using train signals along the way?

I think my interest/aptitude at the people side of business combined with pretty solid technical skills are going to do me wonders over my career

@enderland Most definitely.

Since those are like separate worlds generally

It depends on what you want to do -- there are a lot of people in this world who have both skills, but who aren't asked to actually use both.

I've met the most personable engineers imaginable, who are dead silent in work because their manager respects technical skills above all else, and showing a personality would somehow detract from that image.

That's true I guess, though I think that is probably a lot less problematic in most American companies

Yeah, Japan is odd.

I will give you more details soon (tm). So stay tuned until next week on "As the jmac turns"*

I recently interviewed for a purely technical job and realized I like the people side too much to "give that up" and do more of a focused technical thing

@lorenzog thanks for your helpful comments on this. It's a fine line sometimes; I think I tend to try to prune threads (instead of flushing) more than @jmac does, but it can be hard. Sometimes a comment is good but it starts a long tangent; do you kill the whole thing or just the tangent that followed? Sometimes a good comment becomes obsolete because what it replied to is no longer there. Etc.

And we get a lot of comments (and thus a lot of flags on comments), so sometimes I look at a big pile that started out reasonable and then went...somewhere else, and I have limited time, and I take the easier path. That's not ideal, but sometimes it's the lesser evil.

We all, together, make things like this better through discussion, so thank you for raising this!

@enderland great to hear! And, like jmac, I hope this means we'll be seeing more of you. :-)

I'm undecided