--- title: "Mortal sin #2: Information hoarding" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/6/mortal-sin-2-information-hoarding.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/6/mortal-sin-2-information-hoarding.html" published: "2004-02-06T00:26:00" updated: "2004-02-06T00:26:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "So this is something I don't really get. If you are an MVP, you get access to discussions that the common folks don't have access to. Is it just me or is this situation twisted? The whole point about these discussion…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Mortal sin \#2: Information hoarding By Roy Osherove February 6, 2004 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published February 6, 2004; technical details may be outdated. So this is something I don't really get. If you are an MVP, [you get access to discussions](http://weblogs.asp.net/jasonsalas/archive/2004/02/06/68322.aspx) that the common folks don't have access to. Is it just me or is this situation twisted? The whole point about these discussion groups is that information is **shared**, not hoarded to be kept secret from the “regular people”. I mean, if anyone really needs some good discussions and expert answers its the people who are **not** MVPs, RDs or other blah blah. Here's another example. If you pay some fees per year, you get access to a selection  of private Microsoft newsgroups about various technologies. In these groups you are **promised an answer to your every question**. Hardly the case in the “regular“ newsgroups, right? Why is that? that's just another example of information hoarding, or in this case, “squeezing your customers for stuff you should give for free“ because all these problems are because the developers, which are the actual customers in this scenario,  are having problems with a product that MS is producing: the APIs. This creates a very ironic situation: Even though MS benefits most when a developer knows how to use its technologies and finds it easy to do, they still **charge** the developer to give them better access for resources to learn these abilities. In effect, MS is shooting itself in the foot with these devs. I can just picture how many developers tried to do some thing their boss told them to do, did not know how, looked in the newsgroups, articles and so on and finally gave up. SO their boss gave up on this route and so on and so on. In the end the technology is reflected as hard to use (which it sometimes really is). How many of these cases could have been avoided had these devs been given access to the “private” newsgroups? Can you even project how much revenue you lose in a year over this? The fact is this is **unfair** and every time I see this, be it some MS dev that says “seen this in an internal newsgroup today“ or somewhere else, it gets me riled up. What's that? “_It would be too much noise if we let them all in_“ you say? nonsense. There is so much noise because there is so much quest for knowledge. If you met this noise with the right amount of people to answer the questions eventually you would get a bigger benefit than you do now. I'm afraid there will always be some “elite” group of people out there that have access to all the information that you and I should have access to as well. It's not asking for much. We struggle with the same things everyone else does. Why should we have access to less solutions? Are non MVPs second class developers? Isn't the whole point of being an MVP is that one has been **helping** and **sharing** information with the community? A little counter intuitive for my taste. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Feb 6, 2004 ### [MyDoom (A,B) Worm Removal Tool for Windows XP and Windows 2000](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/6/mydoom-ab-worm-removal-tool-for-windows-xp-and-windows-2000.html) - Feb 6, 2004 ### [In local news...](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/6/in-local-news.html) - Feb 5, 2004 ### [Mortal coding sin: programming in your mother tongue](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/5/mortal-coding-sin-programming-in-your-mother-tongue.html) - Feb 4, 2004 ### [Sign of life](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/4/sign-of-life.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/