Help Vampires: A Spotter's Guide | Hacker News Reader

Help Vampires: A Spotter's Guide

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26 pointsivank10 comments

I do customer support for a non-technical market. Name an issue, my customers have had it -- they can't print when the printer isn't plugged in but the print later button doesn't work, etc. (You might describe this as "I can't save.", since your model of what a program does is a bit more sophisticated than hers is. Plumbing that mental model took a day of wading through some fairly exasperated emails.)

A lot of small software developers think that I must be going totally insane with questions like that. Honestly, no, I could do this forever. I have two main secrets.

One is relentless focus on ease of use, because you CAN find ways to take your existing program, business, and business processes and simplify them so that there are less places to have errors.

The other is that you can never have contempt of your users. Not even quietly to yourself. Don't call them Help Vampires, even mentally. You'll poison yourself, you will start to dread the You've Got Mail light, and you will find answering questions exhausting instead of a routine task which you're paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

P.S. Charge more. If there were such a thing as Help Vampires, and there is not despite the fang-marks in your neck, charging more would be a cross against them. You'll almost invariably find the most difficult people at the bottom of a market.

>> The other is that you can never have contempt of your users... which you're paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

In all fairness... those are clients then. Totally different situation.

While Help Vampires in software development skew male, that's easily attributable to the field's sausage-fest reality.

In the general population, I think that Help Vampires skew female to a large degree. Witness Yahoo Answers (and to a lesser degree Ask Metafilter, from which it was cloned). The vast majority of the askers are female.

As far as I've seen, the vast majority of Yahoo Answers questions aren't really of the "I need help" variety. They're more conversation-starters-in-question-form. It's a forum.

I think it depends on the category, but yes, I can see that.

In the more technical areas there are the predictable "Here's a homework question that I'm sort of trying to disguise" and, what the article said, "How do I build a forum." What Yahoo Answers REALLY needs is an FAQ in each category. But, I suppose, then it would be IRC.

These 'questions' are not allowed on Ask Metafilter. No hypotheticals, no "I'll go first", it'll get deleted as 'chatfilter'

Related to, but a different slant on, http://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html

Discussion of that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682864

"It appears that male Help Vampire, drawn as it is to shiny technology, occupies an evolutionary niche that females of the species simply do not find desirable."

By a percentage involved in tech, there could be more women help vampires but because there are fewer women in tech they are rarer than the male version.

I have met female help vampires. Unfortunately, they are related to me so there's not much I can do.

Yet another reason to avoid success at all costs.

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