The culture and experience gap in the .NET community

I've thought a lot about the culture and experience of the .NET community at large lately. Between the book I'm trying to write, the site I'm trying to maintain (about time to write something new for it!) and the communities I try to be active in (Sitepoint, as well as my own), obviously I think about such things quite a bit. Consider also a number of blog entries about who Microsoft should target with their tools, and the resulting elitist discussions.

I think that yes, it's safe to say that there are various levels of developer skill. In online communities, these different classes interact in different ways. More advanced developers tend to blog more. Hobbyists and mid-level developers tend to hang out in various forums. The two groups seem to rarely intersect.

I'm just as much to blame for that. I've had little spurts where I've tried to stay active in the www.asp.net forums, but some days it can suck the life out of you when you answer the same questions over and over again. When you see people taking the “wrong” approach for something, you get even less interested.

So what do we do about this? Really, none of us have any obligation to help people out (although that's crap, because we all started somewhere way down the hierarchy ourselves). I would challenge you, the .NET guru, to help out anyway. If every guru spent even ten to 15 minutes a day answering some questions, imagine the quality of people in our community overall.

What not to do is propagate some kind of elitist snobbery. That's lame. I'm not suggesting that everyone should like you, or that would even be important to you, but flaunting your worthless-where-I-live certification around and belittling the hobbyist code monkey because you demand six figures a year doesn't really make you very cool, and you certainly won't win my respect.

1 Comment

  • I'm not entirely sure whether I'd agree with all of that. Sure - advanced developers certainly do blog more (though I blog, and wouldn't class myself as an "advanced developer"), write more articles, and as a result maybe have less time to devote to answering questions in a forum. But surely blogs are an equally valuable resource that perhaps need to be promoted more as such? Certainly articles and tutorials are.



    When running Developer Fusion (http://www.developerfusion.com/), I used to spend a long time answering questions posed by our visitors - but now we have a strong community, and although I do "pop in" at least a couple of times a week, I don't devote as much time as I used to - because I know others are also spending time answering questions. I certainly don't feel that by spending less time answering direct questions, I'm contributing less - I'm just contributing in different ways.



    Having said all that - I do see your point to some extent. We certainly don't want to reach a point where "advanced developers" won't "lower themselves" to answering questions in a forum - nor do we want to prevent less experienced programmers from having a blog or writing articles. But fortunately, I don't think we are at this point.



    There are always exceptions to the rule, but in general, I think it's incredible how many people are willing to devote enormous amounts of time to helping out - in whatever way they can.

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