Help yourself first

Here’s a hint for people wanting help from other users: If you learn to help yourself first, additional help will come more readily. Also understand that if you’re a new user, or even if you’re an old user trying something new, just because YOU can’t get something to work doesn’t mean the software is broken.

I like helping people. I used to love doing tech support, believe it or not. I liked teaching too, but teaching is hard work, and very draining. Anyway, because of liking to help people, I hang out at forums sometimes and answer questions if I can.

Often, and it seems more often lately, people show up in the forums and ask the most basic questions. I’m not talking about questions where there is a legitimate reason for confusion, I’m talking about obvious stuff, where even the most minimal curiosity would uncover the answer. The best teachers are a little curiosity, initiative and some self interest. It annoys me to no end when people don’t put in even minimal effort to find the answers to questions themselves. If they won’t help them selves, why should I help them?

On the other hand, if someone is willing to put forth some effort, and showed they have done their “due dilligence”, those are the people I like to help, because I think helping them will be of more benefit than the immediate answer. Maybe what they really need to know is how to think like the software, instead of the specific question that they asked. Once they see how to solve a problem, the next time they have an easier time helping themselves.

The guy who asks how to turn that shiny stuff on, or why an AutoCAD sketch doesn’t work, or he can’t change dimensions (because the sketch is red or yellow) or he’s so pissed off because doesn’t SW work like Inventor is very unlikely to get much help from me. Maybe that makes me a mean old bastard, but I don’t see any point in rewarding laziness.

I believe that effort and competence are important ingredients of success, and you can’t have one without the other. Being spoon fed basic answers makes things easy immediately, but later on you’re just gonna have the same difficulties over and over again, and wonder why. Shortcuts are never really shorter.

Another one along these same lines are people who just look for shortcuts to avoid needing to do things the “right” way, people who think that they shouldn’t need to understand the tools, the tools should just read their minds. Like the guy who argued with me on the forums that Radeons are perfectly good CAD cards, and that there was something wrong with SW because he was having trouble. Or the people who get hung up in in-context modeling and can’t get out. The other day a guy was on the SW forums who knew absolutely nothing about CAD, he was a recent graduate and wanted a volunteer to do some commercial work for him, for a business he was trying to start. He told us he had a goal to have a million dollars in the bank. I supposed he planned to get there by other people being really nice and helping him for nothing. I have no respect for people like that, because they don’t really respect anyone else. I’ve given away more than my share of work to leeches. It’s not even charity, it’s just perpetuating an illusion more often than not. Charity is giving to those who can’t provide for themselves, but what I’m railing against is those who WON’T provide for themselves.

When I’ve written before about the CAD pyramid, these are the people at the bottom of the pyramid that want to be on top with no effort. I toyed around with a slogan for my business “If it were easy, anyone could do it”. If you want to be good at what you do, you have to be willing to put in effort that other people won’t.

So I’m an arrogant snob? You could look at it that way. I believe people are responsible for their own choices. If you choose to always cut corners, and never study or work hard, maybe its not my fault that you have difficulty with stuff. I don’t believe in perpetual welfare in society any more than I believe in it for anything else. Answering questions for people who aren’t interested in helping themselves doesn’t help anyone out in the long run.

So, go search the help, search the SW Knowledge Base, look in the forums. After you’ve tried to help yourself, ask the question and be as complete as you can be. Pictures can be posted on the SW forum, and even parts. If someone just throws away a question like “why does SW suck so bad at importing drawings”, you’re as likely as not to get a sarcastic response. Instead you might say “I’m having problems importing the attached 2D iges file into a drawing, it keeps coming into a part”. Being familiar with the terminology is a big part of asking intelligent questions. You have to make an effort.

Learning how to find answers yourself is the best piece of knowledge you can gain.