The Water Cooler

12:08 AM

One more close vote:

3

I work in a startup as a team lead, and I resigned yesterday after having accepted an offer somewhere else. My reasons for leaving were the following : 1) The codebase I inherited a year ago is a mess and I've never been given the OK to rewrite/refactor the problematic sections. Instead, we ...

jmac

12:33 AM

We are getting some really long comment threads going on recent questions. This is a sign that the question isn't clear since it requires so much clarification. If you see a question with a lot of comments, consider leaving a helpful comment explaining how to improve the question and voting to close as unclear what you're asking as it likely is.

jmort253

12:59 AM

Hi Philip, great answer. Adding citations to answers definitely helps give your post a ton of credibility. as we know you've researched the issue more thoroughly. It also gives folks more to read if they want to dig deeper. With that said, there's an implied message that you believe this won't hurt the asker's chances. I edited to make that a little more direct (as well as to pull in some of the text from the link). Hope this helps. — jmort253 ♦ 1 min ago

While I do think Philip could include more details, the study he included is pretty thought- provoking and demonstrate that he's not just a random person on the Internet making unsubstantiated claims.

While the reference doesn't outright say, "this won't hurt your chances", it does provide a basis for one's interpretation.

To help things out, I edited in what he was implying from the research.

I encourage down voters to take a second look on this one, as most people seemingly don't take the time to find actual case studies and research, yet studies and research really can add a lot of scientific value to our site. Hope this helps.

jmac

2:26 AM

@jmort253 The issue is that it was essentially a link-only answer as is, which is a definite no-no, and it didn't really indicate what the implications of the study were, only provided a link that provided insight in to how a shaved head is perceived.

I love scholarly articles, and think it's a great thing that he provided it, I just wanted him to use that as the base for a fleshed-out answer instead of just the equivalent of a comment with a link. Without the actual explanation, regardless of the quality of the link, I don't think it's a good answer. Your edit helps, but the fundamental issue remains that it doesn't answer the question

Ideally, the answer would read, "Given that the company has no rules regarding appearance that would preclude employment with a shaved head, shaving your head should not have a negative impact on your employment, though it may make you be perceived as more dominant than you are."

jmort253

2:58 AM

@jmac I can see that. It's definitely not a perfect answer. I really appreciate that your comments contain actionable suggestions and not just merely pointing out flaws.

In this case, I suggest a slightly different wording.

> "...could you edit your question to add an answer to the question being asked as well?"

I would probably word this as follows:

> "could you add a little more to your answer to explain how will that affect his employment chances?"

I know the two look almost identical, but the main difference is that, if you look at Philip's response, he got completely hung up on the implication that his post was not an answer instead of one that was merely missing some details to make it a complete answer. The latter phrasing may result in action instead of distraction.

And, in closing, I only pick on your comment because it's already a great example of how we all should approach comments on incomplete answers.

The way you offer suggestions instead of just merely point out what's wrong is what really makes an impact.

On many of the posts where you've flagged and left a comment, you've saved moderators from having to make the tough and often unpopular calls to delete stuff on those occasions where the person actually was inspired to fix their post.

Monica Cellio

Hey @jmort253 (since you're here) -- when we see long comment threads that could use some housekeeping (obsolete, not constructive, etc), would you prefer flags on individual comments or one on the post pointing out the issue? In other words, would you rather just be able to go down the page clicking "delete" or "dismiss" but through a selective view, or do you want less flag clutter but more work wading through it?

(I don't have a specific example in mind, but I've come across some of these and I also saw the comment about long comment threads here earlier.)

jmac

3:39 AM

@jmort253 Yeah, hindsight is 20-20. I proofread my comments and try to think about how they'll be read (I try to always say nice stuff at the beginning and end), but no comment is going to be perfect. I'll keep it in mind for next time. I agree that actionable comments are very important, and try not to flag/vote to close without one (save in egregious cases), I hope that the rest of the community will pitch in too moving forward.

jmort253

3:52 AM

@MonicaCellio Every situation is a little different, so it's hard to say 100%, but in general, if there are valuable comments, we try not to delete them. So if you want to flag individual comments, that's fine. Any comment threads with 20+ comments are automatically flagged and on those we do go down the list.

The tough part comes when some comments are flagged, but similar comments are not, so we sort of end up going down the list anyway... hope that helps... :)

@jmac Me too, in fact, we should encourage other frequent commenters to include those action items in their comments too. :)

Anyway, hope that feedback helps. Thanks again for helping guide folks to better answers. Not only does it help grow the community, but it helps the answerers themselves be better members, and it helps the askers too.

jmac

@jmort253 Funny how that works, it's almost as if I'm modeling my comments after the ones I see from you. Copying is the sincerest form of flattery, or somesuch.

jmac

4:39 AM

Not copying. Imitation. "You'll never forget your English" they said. They were wrong.

gnat

7:15 AM

@jmac I recall getting few surprising upvotes at old garbage answers of mine. My guess is, these may be "signals" coming from fellows 10Kers who see my self-deletion explanation notices but hesitate to use DVs I ask for. Whatever, I mostly self-delete, since these tend to land on the stuff that isn't salvageable...

in The Whiteboard, Aug 27 '13 at 21:18, by gnat

believe it or not but I once posted crap like that myself when I was new at Programmers. If memory serves I "converted it to comment" but if anyone anyhow stumbles over my post like that, please do me a favor, ping me about it with a friendly downvote, I'll take care of it

gnat

7:51 AM

oh my, blatant not an answer (even by lousy SO standards!) getting an upvote (score +1/-2). Something is broken in First Posts review queue I guess...

-1

A: Working at the same place as family

i just wanna ask any literature that would support the mindset to most of the people preferring to work within their locality.

jmac

8:09 AM

@gnat My answers are definitely answers, I just focus a lot more on details of the specific situation rather than the more general question which would make it a better resource moving forward. I may go about editing them in the future to generalize them more.

gnat

8:20 AM

@jmac oh so these are salvageable. Lucky you, in my experience I stumbled upon an old salvageable answer of mine only once, maybe twice

jmac

@gnat My SO answers are pretty bad, but at the time I was the king of the google-visualization tag, so I was still helping (albeit not that well sometimes).

CMW

9:00 AM

7

Q: How to raise concern about code quality?

At my work, I am increasingly concerned about code quality, but find I cannot fix it. I am mostly thinking about the large statement of work incoming and developers I have worked with. I feel some background on my work situation is relevant. I consider my coding ability to be better in terms...

professionalism software-industry work-environment

should we get this one closed as it's allready asked and answered over at programmers, which @gnat pointed out?

gnat

9:53 AM

32

Q: What to do with cross-site duplicates?

What's the right course of action for cross-site duplicates? There are two flavors: A question is posted which belongs on another site and ends up already having been asked there. I can't find an example right now, but it's bound to happen soon if it hasn't already. The same question is posted...

discussion migration close-reasons exact-duplicates site-crossover

^^^ it depends on how good a fit is it for Workplace topics. It smells a lot of Programmers to me, but the question is, is this "a lot" too much?

CMW

11:22 AM

@gnat I think it could be turned into a general topic with some very aggressive editing, but the way it's stated it really is more of a Programmers question

gnat

11:35 AM

@CMW yeah. Luckily, answers given so far keep strong Workplace flavor. It either missed garbage from SO hot list lemmings, or it was deleted

CMW

did it end up on lemming list?

gnat

11:47 AM

@CMW if memory serves, it was there for a while

gnat

12:08 PM

why oh why such c00l/hot SO questions pop up only after I hit the voting limit? 8 answers in 2 hours, almost like at Workplace, only less of upvotes: stackoverflow.com/questions/22501230/too-many-if-statements

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