Why Kyte Tolerates Poor Questions

I have Tom Kyte’s “Ask Tom” in my feed reader, and every now and then it opens for questions and the flood pours in. Quite often there is an interesting question, but more often than not there are quite a lot of “poor” questions: some just poorly worded, some too-easily-googleable, others are could-have-answered-from-the-docs questions. It’s not dissimilar to StackOverflow, which doesn’t suffer so much because of the army of people who work together to either improve or close these types of questions. Sometimes I think “Why did you waste Tom’s time with that? You could have googled it, searched the docs, or opened SO and you’d probably find a good answer there without even having to ask it.”

However, my impression is wrong, I think, because my feed reader only shows me the initial question, and not the detailed follow-up by Tom and others. I was reminded today of how a poor question can still lead to enlightenment, by this excellent quote by Tom:

As things grow and change over time – engineers need to use different approaches. The planes I fly in have wings that go straight out from the plane. That is because I fly at about 500 mph. A fighter jet at mach 2 would be going 1,500 mph. The wings on a fighter jet are significantly different in their architecture – because if they weren’t it wouldn’t work. We have different types of bridges in order to cross different types of chasms. We have different building styles for different types of builds (stick and brick for a 2 story house, steel girders in a frame for 30 story buildings).

As you scale up, the solutions that worked for trivial amounts of data will not necessarily work for large amounts of data.

If you are in a place that says “make it work but do not change code” – expect to have a bad day.

(Source)

And, if you’re wondering how he keeps up with all this:

After 14 years on asktom and 20 years total (usenet news groups last century) answering tens of thousands of questions, I took a break from social media stuff.

(Source)

We could all do with a break from time to time, I think 🙂

Jeffrey Kemp 1 December 2014

development / stackoverflow /

About Jeffrey Kemp

Application Designer & Developer at Oracle specialising in Oracle APEX (Application Express), Oracle SQL and PL/SQL. Oracle ACE Alumni ♠️. Piano player, father, husband, Christian. The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.