The short answer is the people you interacted with are assholes. The stereotype of IT people is that they don’t know how to play with others. Just because it is a Stereotype doesn’t mean it is not earned.

please do not delete your question. it could easily help someone else who has the same issue. by deleting it, you are throwing away the work of the person who took the time to answer it.

…what is is to be a woman in STEM. and why a lot of women leave and why it’s a sausage party. And also why women online often disguise themselves even in games.

That being said I suggest this when some rando online is trying to pressure you: when a person is so fragile to be easily annoyed by your existence: exist harder. They are the fool for giving you such power. Lean into it. Ask more questions. Watch them stir in their seat overreacting.

Cuz one thing I’ve learned is when you are that brave: there are twice as many newbies hiding around you thinking you’re awesome for asking all the hard questions.

Don’t delete because of some elitist assholes. Leave it up for the other newbies. Get more newbies up in their business.

I think there’s a few different things worth addressing here, so please bear with me since this might be a long reply.

What you experienced here is, unfortunately, very common for anyone getting into tech. A lot of us can recall the first time reaching out somewhere for help and receiving a mixture of belittlement and vague answers as a response. I’d argue it’s probably one of the biggest issues we have in this space.

If I had to guess why tech forums are so vitriolic to newcomers, I’d say a lot of us simply forgot what it was like to be inexperienced. They forgot how daunting it is to want to learn, to run headfirst into a bunch of errors you barely understand, and then try navigating a sea of concepts and terminology that practically requires a dictionary of its own.

While the forums rarely get better (unfortunately), never let those people drive you away. It’s incredibly overwhelming at first, and there’s a lot of us who are long overdue for a slice of humble pie, but someday things will start to click and the things you want to do will start to come to life.

It’s late, I’m rambling, but you’ll your footing. When you do I hope you get the satisfaction of telling one of those assholes on the forums to shove it while giving another newcomer the welcome they need

Whilst dealing with this kind of asshole in a work environment is a lot more complex, online they’re like dogs barking behind a wall - only doing it because they're aggressive simpletons and isolated from any problems from doing it - and just as unworthy of consideration or attention as one.

They really only have any impact on you when you give them more importance than they deserve.

Also keep in mind that these people are at the lower end of expertise and professionalism: top experts don't waste time with talking shit like that, they'll just either teach you or (most likely) ignore you because they think that stuff is too basic and not worth their time, and professionals are used to being professional and shit-talking ain't being professional - even in expertise terms these people are unimportant.

Because it took 10, 20 years for them to start to know their ass from a hole in the ground. So they take all the pain of their learning experience and lob it back at you whenever you remind them of themselves starting out.

They might also resent newbies for the much better learning materials available today and even the possibility for easy shortcuts (llms). Back then there was no substitute for sitting down and fiddling with it for hours or reading a some poorly-written book.

Because there is a huge demographic of nerds that are actually chuds and learned absolutely nothing from being bullied and/or being a beginner when they were younger.

I bet you can picture the demographic that they overlap with, but I'ma try not to explicitly make this political.

I'm very sorry this happened to you. Please don't let some assholes discourage you. It's a great profession, and can be a lot of fun.

Unfortunately there's a lot of pretentious and impatient assholes in this field.

That being said, IRL, I've had coworkers that are assholes, and I've had coworkers that have been the most amazing people. Just depends on who's on your team and who you have to interact with.

Just an asshole. My experience is different. Know that you learned from others and stood on the shoulders of giants.

The whole "pay it forward" culture is a thing. So next time, ignore that fucker and teach new people.

It’s funny, right? These dudes will simultaneously decry new programmers relying on AI to teach them but then will also turn around and mock and troll new users like duh… I’d talk to the ai too!

Why do you think they went into a profession where they communicate primarily with a machine?

RTFM

~(but seriously, best attempt is to post wrong code and claim it's the best solution for a problem - you will be instantly corrected)~

Yeah, it's common, especially in programming. It's true that searching on Google usually solves the problem, but the biggest issue is that it's hard to know the exact word you need to use. They know the word so it's trivial for them, but that's not the case with others, and they're proud that they're out of touch with people.

Which forum lol?

I run into people like that at work and what I've discovered is they have no idea they're being rude. Some people in technology are genuinely that out of touch.

Producers too, like music producers I mean. Though I can only speak to that field personally, it might be a similar situation, so I'll share.

Well actually, I mean I guess it's two things- one is that a male-dominated field with a lot of egos involved can pretty easily develop in a snooty direction. STEM careers are famous for that as well. It blows.

The second thing, the thing I was initially going to mention is that at least in the case of producing, there is an epic shitton of information you need to learn to do it well/properly, for starters. Even to just make your first piece, you need to actually STUDY it. That attracts two different archetypes, and the one that sucks is the overwhelming majority. :(

So, as you can probably imagine it's super easy to find courses/tutorials online to learn stuff; you can find the whole field plus music theory on YouTube for free. The problem is that a lot of beginners don't bother to do that, and/or don't think they'll need to. Unfortunately, it's these lazy fucking casuals that saturate all our "ask someone who knows" spaces with asinine, uniformed nonsense questions.

So you see, by the time you see a question from a legitimate learner, sometimes even a peer, you're so annoyed by the other sort that you can't sort them.

That's not fair to the legitimate learners, of course (and as someone who is not yet a full-on expert, I've been on the wrong end of this myself), but thats the sad state of things.

"Growing a thicker skin", or so I'm told, is the only solution. :(

I just created an account to tell you, if you would like, I would be super happy to either answer that question you had, or if I don't know the answer show you how I research problems related to programming or archotecture or algo or whatever needs done to finish a project. I've been in IT for 20 years now. What you experienced is the very thing I've dedicated my career to correcting.

Fuck rude gatekeeping assholes, knowledge is for everyone.

Being in the industry, I don't think they are. Forums attract chronically online and miserable people who are not there for beginners but for their own motives.

Nothing makes some sad sacks feel better about themselves than making fun of someone for not knowing what they have learned. Just know they have been pants on their heads stupid about something and had to ask for help. Count on it.

Being good at programming does not correlate with good people skills or good teaching skills. As you have noticed asking questions on the Internet attracts assholes that want to flex their "intellectual superiority" at others.

Learning programming is hard. Assholes making beginners afraid to ask questions makes it even harder. But I promise you that once you get decent at it, it goes from frustrating to rewarding.

Gamer culture I am assuming?

Btw they weren't ignoring you, they just didn't know the answer themselves and wanted to hide it.

Report the rude assholes. Genuinely not knowing something while genuinely asking for knowledge should never be shat on.

I'm an it professional and I am sad what happened to you.

However, without knowing details I could not pass judgement on what went wrong. Yes, people (not only in it!) are elitist assholes oftentimes but maybe something very basic was off (which you might not have even known, missing experience) and so on and so forth.

Being in the field for decades I can say that there's nothing I have not seen.

Do not lose hope and carry on if you're interested.

Some of them are probably insecure about their own limitations and find pleasure in mocking someone who knows a little less than they do. On the other hand there may also be, among the crowd, those who genuinely found your mistake to be an unusually funny one.

Do I know why that happened to you? No, just guessing.

What I do know though: if it was like some replies here suggest, that it’s all due to IT folks not playing well with others, then forums like stack overflow wouldn’t exist.

What I also know: I’ve been to a lot of forums, not all IT related, and I met quite a few people online who just love to be rude, regardless of the topic.

So if I had to guess why, I’d say because they are assholes, not because it was an IT forum.

Some people are just dick. There might be a bigger crossover between programmers and socially inadequate people, but thankfully it's not a complete overlap (I hope).

Hopefully you'll find saner people somewhere else. It's fine being snarky with people you know and know can handle it, but doing so with stranger online really looks bad moist of the time.

Frankly, this has been quite a significant barrier to my Linux adoption previously. Its really unfortunate that people are like this. I wish there were set tags or communities for noob problems so people could post questions safely. Anyone who doesn't want to engage with noobs can then stay away.

There are shit people everywhere. Focus on the good people and positive spaces.

Without seeing the entirety of the interaction, it's hard to be sure.

Some people are assholes, and because nobody wants to interact with assholes, they usually end up congregating on whatever forum doesn't ban them. Moderation is hard and ban evasion is often easy, so there end up being a lot of places like that.

The other side is that people in general ask a lot of bad questions, and a forum flooded with bad questions becomes useless because people who could answer good questions either get tired of it and leave, or spend so much time on the bad questions they don't have time for the good ones. People get frustrated when they think that's happening to a forum they enjoy, and programmers are famously better at communicating with machines than with people.

Here's are some tips to ask good questions about programming:

• First, try to find the answer without asking other people. This is especially important when it comes to programming because the whole job is problem-solving. That means figuring out how a search result, LLM output, or published documentation relates to whatever it is you're trying to do.
• Once you're sure you need help from other people, clearly articulate what it is you want to happen, what you tried in order to achieve it, and what actually happened. Use more detail than you think you need here, especially regarding your expectations. Sometimes the mere act of composing a question this way leads you to the answer, which is effective enough there's a popular technique of explaining problems to inanimate objects.
• Include the troubleshooting steps you tried from the first step above in your question. By typing it out, you may discover an error or omission in your process, but you also communicate to other people that you're not just being lazy, wasting their time, and reducing the signal to noise ratio of their forum.

IRC is still pretty popular with programmers and in my experience people are helpful on the various tech channels (on libera.chat at least)

I have trained 6 people to fill my shoes in my role. 1 gave up. 1 got fired. 1 was never really a programmer and that resulted in an argument with management about the role actually needed (they call it tier 2 support but you need to be a competent programmer to debug the issues). 2 of the others took other jobs for much more pay. The last guy is still here and he's good I guess...

But I'm tired man... Tired of explaining the same things over again. It's not the new guy's fault but that doesn't change the fact that I've grown jaded. I tend to realize I being a jerk, apologize and tone it down. Doesn't change the fact that my gut response is jerkish.