The Freak Parade

I noticed an incoming link to this blog today coming from a site called crapoverflow.com, and since I know you’ll never guess it on your own I’ll just come out and tell you that it is a play on the name of the new programming Q + A web site stackoverflow.com (which I posted about a while back ago).

The crapoverflow.com web site seems to be just one page. In addition to the razor sharp wit of the name itself, crapoverflow sports a simply side splitting logo that lampoons the stackoverflow logo by making it look like the “stack” might be “crap” coming out of a toilet. Although my description should be vivid enough to elicit an HD quality image in your minds eye, I’ll paste the sites header into the post for those of you lacking imagination:

Ask programming questions. Get answers… just not good ones.
Stack Overflow is by programmers, for mediocre programmers — regardless of platform, or language.
Jump in and share your lack of software engineering expertise! No accuracy or evidence is required. Ever.

The rest of the page is quotes from blog reviews, like the one from my (mostly positive) write up. All the quotes say something un-complimentary about stackoverflow.com. Before I continue, though, I would like to emphasize a few things: I am not writing this to defend stackoverflow.com from this  odd attack. I have little interest in stackoverflow.com personally and could care less about that  Also, I am not writing this to condemn the utterly juvenile author of crapoverflow.com for being utterly juvenile. Whoever took the time to register a domain name, create a logo and dig up any possible hint of a negative mention of stackoverflow.com was clearly slighted in a personal way by either the community that inhabits stackoverflow.com or Jeff Atwood or Joel Spolskey or a combination thereof. While I am tempted to say “time to grow up you sad, humiliated creature” I kind of think this kind of outlet is preferable to  showing up at the stackoverflow.com offices with a semi-automatic and a backpack full of pipe bombs.

So what is my point? A noble one: I will rise to the defense of the poor, downtrodden mediocrity. The “mediocre programmer” gets a lot of hate mail these  days, and it makes my skin crawl every time I see it. First of all, by definition, most programmers are mediocre. Even if most programmers were capable of hacking into NASA and re-programming the space shuttle to swing through a McDonalds drive through and bring them a happy meal, they would still be mediocre because most programmers must be mediocre, mathematics and the English language are very insistent in that regard. So mathematics and the English language being what they are, when a community develops on the Internet and begins to thrive, and it turns out that this community is made up of mostly *gasp* mediocre programmers, whose business is it to issue condemnations?

Closet Mediocrity

First, I’ve yet to meet the programmer who would classify themselves as mediocre. And yet statistically most of us are in those ranks. That means more than a few mediocre programmers are erroneously counting themselves among the elite. So unless you have some sort of proof (beyond the cajoling whisperings of your own ego) that your light shines brighter than that of the status quo, you better keep your yap shut on the matter.

Community is Community

If you start a Q + A site and the experts don’t show up, should the rest then lay down and die? Or rend their tunics and make sacrificial offerings hoping they will show up after all? If most of us are mediocre by definition, and we get together to help one another out as best we can, who is the victim? Let’s have a thought experiment shall we … let’s say I asked for some help and I received some advice and the advice turned out to be mediocre. Even so, despite its impurity, it helped me through my problem. It wasn’t the way an expert would have solved the problem, to be sure, but the expert never showed up to gift me with her genius, and yet things turned out OK in the end anyway. The solution to my problem, thanks to the mediocre chap that answered my mediocre question, was squarely mediocre. Actually since I myself am mediocre the solution fit in nicely with the rest of my mediocre project. It doesn’t strike terror into my heart to contemplate such a scenario, nor does it make me snigger condescendingly and count my lucky stars I’m not mediocre. It makes me glad such communities exist, because if the elite programmers are too busy writing software to lend a hand they may as well not exist, and yet we must march on, mediocre or not.

Actually, We’re All Mediocre

Whoever you are, you too are mediocre. Even if your genius in matters of programming is unparalleled then in your personal relationships, or your spiritual life, or in the sack, whatever, mediocrity has set a place for you at its table. But let’s reel it in a little and assume you’re not one of the half dozen most brilliant programmers in the world – in that case, I can make you an utterly mediocre programmer no matter who you are just by choosing the set of programmers in which you are to be counted. So mediocrity then is entirely relative, and therefore an illusion. To look down your nose at the man treading water down stream from you is to ignore the countless others who have already passed you by a mile. If the fellow is struggling and it distresses you, lend a hand. If you can’t be bothered, then don’t, he’ll do just fine. But it is vulgar and absurd to shout an insult at him, or to preach to others that its people like him who are keeping us from reaching our full potential.

Is this the part where you say “Amen” and hand out the little crackers?

Sooooo…thats it really. To be fair, the vast majority of people in the programming communites I haunt that I would consider to be “elite” expend vast amounts of effort feeding the community the fruits of their knowledge and insight, and usually with a reasonable amount of humility. It’s even a little awe inspiring sometimes. It is usually the false-prophet, the average Joe that fancies himself a rock star, that is likely to make some pointless attack on the imaginary ranks of the mediocre (what I like to call  “spitting on Mort”). Even so, each time someone does this it leaks a little poison in the water supply we all depend on for survival, even though it is almost always unintentional. So if I had a particular point, I guess it would be to try to keep a few things in mind, especially when you feel the urge to jump onto a soap box and start talking down to people:

1. We’re all doing the best we can. Really. What else could we do?

2. Everybody has a right to lend a helping hand, to ask for help, to discuss a technology, to offer an opinion, to participate. If we all had to be experts and 100% sure of what we say in order to participate in the community you’d hear nothing but crickets, I guarantee it. If you encounter an error someone has made through inexperience, be generous and correct it, don’t complain about it, it makes you look ugly and as a result you won’t get laid without having to pay for it.

3. However smart you may be you’re a bumbling idiot compared to someone. Just keep that in mind and not only will you be more pleasant to be around but you’ll be more useful to the world and you’ll learn faster as well.

Amen. Here is the body, and here is the blood. See you next Sunday.