You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer.
It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics.
You have a problem. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck.
It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere in the team.
The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track it down for them.
Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what the error is.
I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error message is is useful to the person trying to help you and to proactively provide the contents of the error message, even if it's a shitty cell phone picture of the error.
I guess we all have different styles but some may be more inclusive than others.
"Teams" are also going to have different dynamics than "strangers on a help forum."
You could say that people have the responsibility to demonstrate that they put in the effort and created value, but then you get the situation where people naturally optimize perception of effort or value over actual effort or value, because in the end that is what is rewarded. Then you can also say that people also have the responsibility to look a bit closer before estimating real value, but that takes more effort and people naturally strife towards efficiency. I would guess that the problem today is that the balance between these two is off, and we're doing too much of the former and too little of the latter.
Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for me.
Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it turns out that LTV is very wrong. Economists showed that effort does NOT impart value.
But researching this a bit, I find that it still predates Marx. I find:
Sir William Petty, 1662: "If a man can bring to London an ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same time that he can produce a bushel of Corn, then one is the natural price of the other."
More important, it seems that David Ricardo (a big name in economic history), in 1817 latched onto what Smith had written and states it quite definitively.
Even in performative scenarios, like say someone gets promoted at work over another person because they are a great “performer” and always make noise, whereas the other actually delivers - they’re being promoted because the promotion is defensible and legible for their superior. That is true value for them, just not to another viewer.
1. HM: AI generated email with "tailored" questions
2. Me: AI assisted response with answers (I confess)
3. HM: AI generated email with a "thoughtful" response + invite
4. Me: AI generated "thank you & looking forward" response ...
Looking back at the thread, I have to laugh and cry at the same time. It's so obvious and sad.
"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal.
The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.
For HN comments, 99.9% of the time, a short comment is a low effort one and should be disregarded.
I tried to recall the last time I saw what I felt was an ego-driven tirade on HN comments, and I'm currently drawing a blank. There's a lot of what's called "performative erudition", and there is the occasional lengthy diatribe, but I would call neither one of those ego-driven tirades.
(brevity, purposeful /s).
With LLM's, we are in a new state of the world: it can expand any one sentence off hand remark in an essay.
That may be enough in some cases.
Sometimes people are not looking for fully fleshed out high-effort answers. They want a pointer (to documentation, or a repo) to get going from someone more experienced.
Google search may throw up too much information and it is hard to make a choice. A one sentence answer from an expert may be enough to set them on the right path.
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-ask-good-technical-... is a pretty good example.
Going back more than two decades is ESR’s “How to Ask Smart Questions”. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I once consulted for a company in the content marketing business that was one of the largest and fastest growing startups of its country. The content production in itself was "cheap", a dollar for 500 words. But it collapsed, due to the unbearable amount of people required to review
Now virtually all content is generated by AI and the old customers don't have anyone to verify anymore.
Companies are made of people who are shitty to each other but trust machines blindly.
!
Or, depending on the context, perhaps give a thorough enough answer with citations that it should either answer questions on the topic fully or explain where anyone interested in the topic can do their own research, such that if the question is asked again one could just link to your previous post.
This might not satiate a poster if they're dumb enough, but it's worth remembering that the post will be searchable and usable for reference by other people.
"If it isn't important to you, it isn't important to me."