--- title: "Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?)" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/7/10/attack-of-the-high-and-mighty-forum-reply-or-cant-you-just-a.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/7/10/attack-of-the-high-and-mighty-forum-reply-or-cant-you-just-a.html" published: "2006-07-10T10:05:00" updated: "2006-07-10T10:05:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Careful – major rant! I was having a question from one of clients about something they are dealing with. I know the app, I know the design and the problem was something I didn’t know how to solve (technical problem with…" 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/" --- # Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?) By Roy Osherove July 10, 2006 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published July 10, 2006; technical details may be outdated.  Careful – major rant! I was having a question from one of clients about something they are dealing with. I know the app, I know the design and the problem was something I didn’t know how to solve (technical problem with caching that seems to have a hotfix somewhere). So I asked a question on a forum. It always bugs me a bit when people, instead of answering the question, try to “look at the big picture” as if everything would be just dandy and you wouldn’t need to ask them that silly question at all if you’d just listen for a second with your little mind and understand that you are the problem, and there is no solution but to change the way you think. Well, excuse me, all you high and mighty people who answer questions you weren’t asked. Sometimes, I (Or other people who ask) just want to check out the symptom. I may already \*know\* about the “bigger” problem that leads to the design issue or whatever the symptom is, but I’m aware of it! No need to spend two paragraphs telling me “Do I need to mention that this is a design poo-poo?” – please! If you need to ask –the answer is an absolute –No! You do NOT need to mention that, because that’s not why I asked. I can see how that arrogant answer may prove useful in various forums for newbies in various areas, but when the question is about an advanced issue, in an advanced forum, from an experience person, who isn’t really looking for design help, you can assume that they have already asked themselves the same thing, and if they still have a question – you need to assume that this is how they’d need to deal with it for now, so how to you go about solving this – is the answer you need to answer, not anything else. Thank you! ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Jul 23, 2006 ### [Moving to FeedBurner](https://osherove.com/blog/2006/7/23/moving-to-feedburner.html) - Jul 18, 2006 ### [Could JaJah be the next Skype Killer? 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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/