Unhelpful “helpful” people

I keep meaning to getting back to more technical blogs but I need to spend some time sorting it out first, and something has just bugged the hell out of me, so another “wordy” one today.

Richard Foote has gone back to explaining the basics of indexes and the CBO, which if you are new to CBO or indexes, hot-foote {sorry} it over there immediately and check it out. He is a brilliant teacher.

Near the start, he has a link to someone on one of the OTN forums who is stating the Cost Based Optimiser sucks. I won’t repeat the link. No, sod it, I WILL repeat the link. Here it is. It might elevate the page in google’s scoring but what the heck.

This person’s rather poor outlook on the CBO did not bother me, nor the fact that he is, in my opinion, wrong {he suggests using the rule hint on oracle 10, which is an option but is not, in my opinion, a mighty good idea as (a) who now knows the rules of the Rule Based Optimizer and (b) the hint will be ignored if you are using most new features added since 8, such as bitmap indexes or IOTs or partitioning. It might {and I have no proof for this} cause the feature not understood by the RBO to not be used, so maybe ignoring a nice bitmap index or function based index. Oh, and (c), if you have good stats the CBO usually wins.}.

What irritated me was his/her high-handed and abusive posting. That really annoys me. Then I thought “no, we all lose our temper sometimes and the person they are having a pop at did kind of ask for it”. But because I think that being abusive or condescending on forums is such bad behaviour, I dug a little into the other postings by this person.

Some were helpful. Many were simply links back to other pages or to some front end to Google the person’s question. And several, many, were abusive. Along the lines of “Why are you so stupid”; “If you can’t be bothered reading the manual you don’t deserve help”; “I would not employ you as you are a moron”. You get the idea?

It is a big problem with forums, and actually also in the work place (and occasionally, sadly, at meetings and conference). People being condescending, antagonistic and demeaning to others who do not know what they, the Mighty Brain, knows, who seem to Mighty Brain to not be trying quite as hard as they could or are seemingly asking something obvious.

OK, if it is obvious, give the answer. It might be that you, oh Mighty Brain, did not understand the question. OK, they maybe are not trying hard enough. Suggest to them where they could look, maybe this person has 3 managers breathing down their necks and they just really, really want an expert opinion now as they are not sure which of the seven opinions in google to trust. And Mighty Brain, unless you were born with your knowledge placed in your head by God, as a special force on this earth, you didn’t know what this “moron” does not know at one time. Someone told you or, vary rarely, you worked it out for yourself.

The truly, blood-boilingly, unjust thing about Mighty Brain? They are so sure of their own towering knowledge that they can’t see that they are often wrong.  I can’t think of any Oracle Expert who is widely accepted by their peers who is a “Mighty Brain”. In fact, a common trait of the very best practitioners and teachers (of any subject, not just IT) is that they are always willing to admit they do not know and to learn.

I did look for a way to ask for this particular Mighty Brain to be barred from the forum, but then I just decided to vent my spleen on my blog and have a glass of wine.

I hope that person trips over and really cracks their shins or something. Nothing permanent, just something incredibly painful. Grrrrrr.

Update – Jonanthan Lewis has commented to let me know that this “unskilled and unaware” {what a brilliant phrase} is the Dunning-Kruger effect. The link got filtered out by the comment mechanism, so I’ve posted it {well, maybe a similar one} here. Thanks Jonathan.