How would you handle this situation?

Question

I am curious to see what other people have to say about this. I recently answered the following question:

FOR Loop Gives Last Value in List Each Time

The user got upset with me and took my answer as an insult (although I did not intend for that at all). I guess I could have worded my answer differently, but what I said was correct. The code that was written was inefficient (and everyone does this from time to time, nothing wrong with that). I tried to explain why I said it was inefficient and took time writing code to help prove out my point. I then later added an explanation of exactly what I was talking about to make it clear for the user.

In the pseudo code I wrote, I accidentally included a SOQL query inside a for loop. The user pointed it out to me, but instead of being polite about it, displayed hostility towards me because they had taken offense and downvoted my answer. They then made the following comment:

This does cause a SOQL query for every imported object....You do not need the if(found) clause...seems to be a "truly inefficient" way to do this....

At this point I did get a bit annoyed so I retorted back. In retrospect, I should not have done that. I went back and did what I originally should have done and changed my original upvote to a downvote. I wanted to show the user their behavior was unacceptable, so I changed it.

• What should I have done differently?
• How would you have handled this?
• This site is for future users as well as the person who originally asked the question. Even though my answer didn't specifically address the question (although it did answer it, it just didn't point it out), should I still have posted it?
• I have always been of the mindset that if you can help improve code, you should. Do you think it is appropriate to sometimes help users if you think their code is going to do something different than they intend?

Answer 1

People get offended all the time in bulletin boards. I've adapted by always making my posts as factual as possible and trying to avoid criticizing question-askers for being wrong (I'll happily criticize poorly asked questions though :)

In this case, your "truly inefficient" comment and your semi-retaliatory downvote were your contributors to the situation. You could have avoided criticism of the approach altogether and just pointed out a superior solution. In cases like this, where someone is doing something pretty wrong, I usually just go quickly past the cause to the solution: "You're doing X which is causing behavior Y, but you want behavior Z. So change A to B and that should fix it."

That said, even the most diplomatic of people and replies sometimes get into flame wars, and OP's response was unnecessarily sarcastic.

In a forum like SE, where we are truly giving out expert advice for free, I just (sometimes permanently) ignore people who are not thankful or who cross the line in terms of what they expect from me.

If someone asks me to write code for them after my very helpful answer, I just ignore them. If someone posts a sarcastic/snarky comment, I just ignore them and put them on my mental "do not assist" list. If someone calls me on downvoting them (seems to happen more here than on SO), I either ignore them or occasionally explain why if I feel it would be constructive.

There is less than nothing to gain from getting into arguments on technical Q&A boards. In this case, I would have walked away after his comment about "truly inefficient".

One of the things I like about SE is the reputation system. You've got one of the highest scores on this site, and it's very well-deserved. You could have been a bit more diplomatic in this one case, but the OP (a newcomer) could have been too. I'd just walk away, maybe enjoy a self-imposed cooling off period of interacting with this particular user, and keep the good answers coming.

Answer 2

The way I handle this on the developerforce boards, the home of truly inefficient code, is to first try to identify and help with the problem the OP has encountered, and then follow up with something like:

However, this isn't the most efficient way to do this, as the combination of x and y means that you will breach governor limits if you are dealing with more than 'n' records at once.

Sometimes I'll preface this with "I'm duty bound to point out" to soften the blow.

The main problem, as others have pointed out, is that its very hard to tell from raw text on a page if the comment is intended in a jocular or sniping fashion. The same goes for people's responses - I jumped down the odd respondees throat when I first started out, only for them to post abject apologies that made me feel terrible. When you throw in the fact that english may be people's second language it just makes it worse.

WRT your comment:

In a forum like SE, where we are truly giving out expert advice for free, I just (sometimes permanently) ignore people who are not thankful or who cross the line in terms of what they expect from me.

surely we should be trying to help these people improve their netiquette rather than just ignoring them?

Answer 3

First, I'm glad you realized the retort did not help anything. Secondly, I agree you should have worded your answer differently; using a phrase such as "truly inefficient" is bound to upset many people.

I would take the tact of giving a clean and simple answer first and then offering an alternative algorithm second. I expect most users would appreciate seeing a more efficient algorithm (I know I do), but nobody wants to feel like they've been explicitly called out. I would just say something to the effect of, "you're doing A, but if you look at B then you might see some gains."