🥺 Why Genius Coders Don’t Help Others?

It was originally an answer to a question on Quora formulated like in the title. I’d not call myself genius coder. But it was interesting to answer to shed some light on the culture of the coding community and why it’s not always possible to help from a perspective of software engineer that supports other dev for like 17 years.

Yesterday a guy asked me on Facebook if I can help him with a complex integration problem between a web framework and a database.

I have asked him some details. Gave approximately 5 ways he can go further with his problem. In return he sent me his code; wrote to me whole day while I was at work and I was unable to write. He asked me to run his code and debug. It is literally several hours to set up his stack and code, just to begin with…

It is not like I dont want to help. I help developers since high school. Gave lectures about it, wrote a book, been involved in forums for developers and reached 2% of top developers on StackOverflow users by helping others. I made series of video tutorials, and wrote a blog about programming, reviewed programming books. And always been there to help in my capacity.

I don’t believe there are bad questions. I think currently a lot of software developers became so egocentric and self focused, they are mostly arrogant to beginners. And I don’t…