qualitative decline of xsl-list questions (was Re: Dat

Michael Kay wrote:
> > Sorry , Sorry the question was how to identify that it is a 
> > date value(or in the other words how do u decide whether it is date)
> 
> How on earth do you expect anyone on this list to know enough about your
> data to answer that question?
> 
> You could try testing to see whether it is 8 digits and whether the last
> four digits are a number in the range 1970 to 2030. If you don't like
> that rule, then you should be able to think of a better one. If you
> can't, it's because the whole idea is misguided. Why are you processing
> incoming XML documents whose tags you don't understand?

<rant>

What amazes me is that people who ask questions like that have jobs in
software engineering / web application development at all. (I'm talking about 
the original poster, not Michael Kay).

I've been in a position to interview people and contribute to hiring decisions
in the past, and the #1 thing I try to look for in a candidate is
resourcefulness in problem solving. I don't want to hire someone who memorized
a certification study guide, or who pretends they know everything and never
asks for help; I want someone who can quickly find out and figure out almost
anything, and who is humble enough to know when they're in over their head,
when to consult with an expert, and when to pass on a project that they're not
qualified to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

To this person's credit, they did ask in a public forum that is somewhat
appropriate. And I can give them a break for perhaps being on the receiving
end of XML with a schema so poor that a given element "may or may not be a
date". But it doesn't reflect well on them that they don't seem to understand
that it is *their* job to know how to determine whether a given string of
character data meets *their* application's criteria for being a date. All they
needed to do was provide that information, and people here could have helped 
them to make that determination in XSLT.

I've been noticing this trend on xsl-list. People are more and more frequently
asking questions that make it sound like they're in the wrong line of work.
Perhaps that's being a bit harsh, but the spate of questions of this sort is
leading to increasingly hostile or belittling tones from Mssrs. Carlisle and
Kay, among others (e.g., "Why on earth...?" with its implicit "you FOOL!").  

Some of us have decided to just not answer, half the time, since it's hard not
to resent the fact that we're providing a no-charge advanced technical
consulting service for people who may or may not deserve their jobs, while
there are those among us (me, for example) who have been out of official work
for 9 months or more.

Perhaps we are the ones in the wrong field, if we're the ones finding it so
frustrating to encourage others who are new to it, eh?

</rant>

Mike
-- 
  Mike J. Brown   |  http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
  Denver, CO, USA |  http://skew.org/xml/

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