• Want everything handed to them on a silver platter, and now!
  
• Never learnt the art of research
  
• Need to be hand-held and spoon-fed
  
• Do not read documentation
  
• Need example code, without first trying to solve the problem themselves
  

Have a good weekend.

Francis.

couldn't have said it better myself!!

U2, Francis...

Francis, I think you forgot...

• Never Wrong
  
• Never There Fault
  

Parent of two teenagers.

Quite right, but "time is on their side, Yes it is".
And when they turn to be brilliant, they rise very high.
Cordially and Focusely
PS : Young people, please don't tell what you think of old people (speaking, for myself, Francis is very young in his head)

You oldies, fed up with being the nice guys already?

I must admit I'm one of the gimmes, young in spirit and in experience. You can't blame me for one, I have been well fed here , and on the other hand, my boss wants his reports NOW!

Waz, I have 2X the trouble you have with teenagers and girls are the worst!

Hua

Get off my lawn!!!

sorry - couldn't resist...

RickW

Hua, it's not a case of being fed up already,

It's a simple case that over the last 18 months to 2 years it's been a case of I want, Give me,
on more and more posts, just like badly brought up children or computer specialists who don't
actually want to do anything for themselves.

You never learn anything by just taking, what we only ever ask anyone to do is at least investigate and try first.

Do that and you will always get lots of help.

I've never seen a case on the forum where someone has at least tried, get anything other than help.

Could this be the Generation Gap.

I like to think I'm still young (in spirit). But alas, reality reared it's ugly head on Saturday morning after my first Friday night hockey game of the season.

Now I have to go and finish my pickling ....

Darryl, I'm with you on the "young in spirit" - the mind says young(ish) but the body disagrees

Also, I am not totally convinced that it is just young folks. I know, and have experienced, some who never seem to want to do the ground work themselves. The only way to change their attitude is to "sour the milk" and not supply help to those that continue to show no interest in helping themselves.

As most of the people on this board who actually know me and can vouch, I will help anyone. If they try to help themselves then they are more likely to receive that help, if they don't then I don't tolerate "takers".

But all that said, remember, we all have off days!

Good morning everyone

T

Well... all that is true and the kids think we (oldies) will never survive winter...

But let us not ***** too much about those who don't open the manuals (let alone read them): they provide us with our bread and butter.

If they did, and succeed, who will need consultants!!! So let's pray that the economy turns up and we are needed more than ever

Sadly what you say is true for a lot of young people.

But there are also exceptions (like me, if you consider 24 as being young ;-)).
I prefer to try everything out by myself (I'm spending a lot of time online searching the internet to find out how things work). Once I had a technical problem and spent several hours trying different things by my own. After I couldn't find a solution, I asked another person (she had the solution within five minutes).

(For WebFOCUS I prefer hand-coding everything in the DevStudio editor instead of using the assistants, IMHO the editor is a lot faster before having to switch from assistant to assistant.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tgall,

Welcome to the WF forum, TGALL. Nice attitude!

And this also shows that there are exceptions to (almost) every rule.
I do agree with most of the comments in this post, but also recognize that there certainly are people who try their best to come up with any kind of solution before asking others. These people however, are usually quite elaborate in telling what they already tried. If I can be of help to them, I'll give it.
It is the one or two lines posts that 'make demands' that I just skip and never answer.

Tobias,

Welcome, and please believe me, 24 is still young by a margin

Like Daniel, I applaud your approach. You should never be short of a reply if you hold that principle!

T

Thank you :-)

The main reason I registered here:
- Getting the Focal Point Email Digest
- I wanted people to find me (I did a presentation at Summit 2009 (topic "Host FOCUS migration to WebFOCUS") and sadly forgot to add a "contact" section to my presentation. People can now find me using the forum search ;-)


I'm currently inactive on the forums because we're only two people developing / maintaining our WebFOCUS applications on our site.
Currently I'm teaching another developer how to create / maintain our WebFOCUS reports, so I hope I'll have a bit more time in the future to become part of this great community.

Right on, Tony_A. Cut the cord, cut the supply! ...oops,that is not what I want to say. ...Oh yah, RickW, I can't hear a word you said. Don't you see the headphone on my ears? I like to have them 24-7. Looks like you need help getting off that rocking chair of yours.

Sorry, I have been behaving badly. Please forgive me.(I still want my allowances, and I want to be dropped off at my friend' house ...NOW)


Seriously, I love you all! I see many of you took pride helping us out. If my learning curve of a new language have been cut short, it is because of this wonderful forum.
In Chinese, the word knowledge is compounded by two verbs - learn & ask. Learning from the book will gain the fundamental knowledge. Asking is a powerful way to acquire knowlege beyond limit.

I know there are many silent users in this forum. I often found answers that someone else asked for me. So all I want to say that your effort will be greatly appreciated and won't be wasted.

Thank You,

Hua

Hua, since our cubes shrunk I pretty much wear headphones all the time due to the contant conversations and other noise around me. Techno/house some metal mostly - good programming music - Crystal Method, Tool, etc.

Tgall has it right. The best way I've figured out to learn and retain knowledge is to do the research, try it, slam my head against the desk a few times , try it again, repeat, etc... - and then ask for help when I've convinced myself that I've exhusted my brain juice.

People are truly doing their own disservice by not doing the research. Really makes me wonder the type of quality that is being produced, assuming that quality matters anymore...

quote:

Crystal Meth....

Hey Rick man, not something to shout about it's probably what is causing you to bang your head against the desk - lol

T

Shrunken cubes?! Sounds painful!

OK - I just have to ask this question...

"Once I had a technical problem and spent several hours trying different things by my own. After I couldn't find a solution, I asked another person (she had the solution within five minutes)."

Are you 'old folks', as you call yourselves, really advocating this kind of productivity? Where is the logic in that? If I'm hiring a consultant I want the one who gets the answer in five minutes and gets the job done not the one who spends several hours trying stuff!

Around the turn of the century I spent a few years building a knowledge management program for an IT consultancy. We deliberately put mechanisms in place so one person in the organization could leverage the knowledge and experience of everyone else in the organization and vice-versa. Getting the five minute answer was the rule, not the exception. I think the paradigm shift has gone from being a subject-matter expert to being a subject-research expert. I would submit to you that the most successful knowledge workers are not the ones with the most answers in their heads but the ones who know where to get the answers.

In this day and age with such wonderful synchronous and asynchronous communications methods can you really fault someone for throwing the question out there? If I can find a willing person to send back a reply in minutes rather than spending hours banging my head against the proverbial wall I'm all over that. Copy and Paste baby!

Look, I do WebFOCUS development because it's my job. As you have seen from most of my posts I do try stuff and do research before I post. Ultimately I'm in the business of turning out applications that work right and are delivered on time and under budget.

I think there must be a happy medium here. Back in the day it was difficult to get answers from other people because you didn't have such useful communication tools. If you called someone you had to hope they were available at that very moment. Sending text back and forth wasn't very practical. Unless you worked with a guru who liked you enough to share you just didn't have much choice but to read the manual or use the trial-and-error method. I get that. I've been there and done that with other things.

If this were an art or craft to me I'd want to take all the time in the world and experiment and play with stuff. That is what an artist or craftsman should do. Some of you may consider yourselves artists and I think that's cool. You're the ones spending time on your holidays scouring the ibirls.js file, coming up with the best techniques for reporting with the least number of passes at the data, learning ways to 'trick' the parser, the list goes on and on. I am eternally grateful to you all for doing that kind of work and I sure hope you enjoy doing it. When you take all that experience and use it to answer my questions you are doing me and the craft of writing code a tremendous service!

I recall in my early days of learning WebFOCUS I posted some 'dumb' questions and I took my share of abuse. I guess what I'm trying to say to you well-seasoned programmers is try to remember what it was like when you first started learning something. In the beginning you don't even know enough to know what questions to ask! If you see someone who you think is freeloading or trying to cheat the system, kindly point out to them that they may get more detailed answers if they ask more detailed questions. Use it as a teachable moment.

Respectfully,

Dan Pinault

Very well said Dan!!
I really appreciate your thoughts!

I see your point Dan. I guess I'm coming from a developer point of view where it's part of full time job to work in the product (or any new product) so that's my own personal bias.

I certainly ask "quick hit" questions now and then for that reason and how much time one spends on trying to figure out a problem is certainly an issue.

If someone hires a consultant - that consultant had better know the toolset, software, product, language, etc. or someone made a very big mistake in the hiring process.

Use the PDF help files first for searching for answers, I find them they're much better then the HTML/F1 help in Dev Studio.

My personal thought process is that I want to make sure I actually understand what the problem is before I seek help. Taking "some" time to find an answer to a problem is a valuable and essential process.

...but there's also a fine line between being able to do your own work and expecting other to do your work for you. I also would not hire someone who knows where to get all the answers, but has little actual knowledge of their own or desire to accomplish their own tasks.

You might be OK with individuals soaking up knowledge from others within your own organization when they find themselves lacking (because you're paying the bill for all of them.) But it isn't really fair that they are asking (or demanding) resources from individuals in other organizations, especially when they can't even give a precise description of the problem in the first place.
But then there are some nice folks out there who help out whenever they can - regardless of the demands.

I wholeheartedly agree with Tony's comment that you'll ALWAYS get more AND better information when others can see that you've tried to help yourself first. You may have no idea what the solution is, but if you've done your work and have a pretty good idea of what the problem is before asking others, you'll really be further ahead.

And then, for heaven's sake, when you're given some help, take a minute to figure out how that solved the problem so you don't have to ask for help again the next time.

Dan, I understand your point of view. In these times the push is always to get the job done quickly, sometimes to the detriment of the result.

In fact is an organisation, that is what managment does every day, ask a question, and someone else gets the answer for them.

But I think this is different. If a developer always cuts and pastes, and does not understand what the code does, then nothing is learned. In fact they may end up depending on those sources of information, without it , are incapable of fulfilling a request.

I have seen many members of this forum grow over the years, but others have not changed there ways, and that is the disappointment. It is the frustrating part.

The one thing that I am not certain has been said in this forum before, but needs to be said here, is that to use WebFOCUS, you need to know more than WedFOCUS. A good WebFOCUS programmer will know FOCUS code, HTML, Javascript/VBscript, Excel, data sources, operating systems, the list goes on. Its necessary to properly finish these tasks.

I have always been a proponent of self sufficiency, help won't always be around.

In many ways this is very much like raising children. You want the best for them, but you don't want to make it too easy, they will have to leave home sometime (I hope).

A manager of mine once told me

quote:

Information Is Power, Keep It To Yourself And Everyone Must Come To You

I think a much better quote would be

quote:

Knowledge and Understanding are the first steps to wisdom

Good thing this forum has a good flow of information.

Good points Dan and well presented. Let me expand a bit on some of them as I see them ...

".... advocate this kind of productivity?" - not really but you can't knock someone when they do not get provided with the support for a job they are being asked to do. It appears that a few companies may be withholding training (essential for some) and relying upon the good nature of folks on this BB to provide it for them - free of charge.

".... hiring a consultant" - hmmm, I agree, if you hire a specialist consultant or consultancy company (a real one not just someone whose company labels them as such) then you should expect competency. However, if you are employing someone (permanent not contractor) to use a new language that they have not encountered before then I think training should be provided and the trainee should endeavour to recompense their company by making the most of that training.

".... fault someone for throwing the question out there?" - Not really, but it depends on how it's asked. A demand is fairly obvious most of the time (even if it's not meant as one) and over time one can spot those who try and help themselves first. Sometimes the question is one that has been asked many times and could be answered very quickly through using the search engine - and yes I agree that it is difficult to always get the correct search criteria for a specific problem. There are many questions and many methods of delivery, some irk whilst others do not, we are not all the same (it would be boring if we were ) and consequently react differently.

Another thing to remember is that there is a wide mix of abilities that frequent this BB, some are seasoned A/Ps, developers (call them what you will) and have crafted their skills over many years, finding the best method of learning for them. There are others who have shown a penchant for report writing using WebFOCUS and are being utilised by their companies to provide the core end user reporting. They don't necessarily get the grounding in data processing (ah the "old" days ) that would help them understand data relationships and everything else that goes with DP. Bless them for trying for most of them will succeed. Another group are made up of recently graduated people (both young and old) who get a job for a (all too often outsourcing) company and then are not supported in their learning process (how often do real world situations crop up in a text book?).

I like to think of the brain as another muscle, if you don't exercise it, it will turn to mush

Oh, and I don't think of myself as an "old folk" just someone who's not so young anymore ... oh dear, matron is rounding us up again and sealing us in our rooms for the night if I work on the bars a bit more tonight I could be free this time tomorrow

T

Keep working on those bars, I'll be waiting in the getaway vehicle.

Escape should be easy if those bars are made of chocolate...

- Francis (Young at heart and mind)

As long as they are 70% cocoa or more.