9

What was wrong with this question?

https://workplace.stackexchange.com/q/154592/437

The text of the question was:

I prefer competition to collaboration. Is this compatible with a career in software?

I'm an intermediate dev who has been doing this for 4 years now. Of late, I have lately only been motivated when my work is competing against someone else's such as in an RFP, as part of our innovation competition, or as part of our sprint (we keep score using points, so I like to pile those up).

If it is just collaborative day of day to day work with no clear success/fail evaluation, I sometimes call in sick and stay in bed and sleep all day like a lazy person. I just no longer care/can be bothered with things which are not my sole responsibility.

I've had this problem for a while. I tried changing jobs 5 months to mitigate it and move to a less team based role, but I still ended up with this problem again.

I can't continue dragging myself to work everyday like this. Is there a way to have a competition based software career so that I can be motivated?

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  • 5
    A screenshot would be nice, for those of us under 10k rep
    – Richard
    Commented Mar 7, 2020 at 14:05
  • 1
    @gnat the mods deleted the question, so I assume it was mods?
    – Matthew Gaiser
    Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 2:33
  • 4
    I flagged it to the mods, as I felt it was from our current troll who has posted similar non-poop questions. I guess the mods agreed
    – HorusKol
    Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 4:38
  • 9
    I was one of the people who answered it. Although it has some elements in common with the troll, I did not see anything wrong with the question. In my opinion, questions that are reasonable in themselves should be given the benefit of the doubt.
    – Patricia Shanahan
    Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 4:41
  • 4
    Trolls are trolls, don’t feed them, you’re not helping anyone when you do and you are letting a troll keep a toehold and getting in the way of their quick banning, spend your time helping real people with real problems.
    – mxyzplk
    Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 13:30
  • 4
    @mxytplk - SE stops being evil: Trolls are trolls, this is true, but what is the connection to the question? Do you want to argue that this is a troll question or what?
    – guest
    Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 22:09
  • 2
    @JimG. you asked this on a sunday, give it some time for him to show up. Iirc not all mods are active and monitoring meta during the weekend.
    – Magisch
    Commented Mar 9, 2020 at 7:41
  • 2
    is that the question with wall of text? i VTCed and downvoted it. Maybe the Q was edited later, but ppl like me didn't care to follow-up and check on it
    – aaaaa says reinstate Monica
    Commented Mar 10, 2020 at 16:40
  • 5
    This question seems incredibly easy to salvage. I don't care if it was by the troll, the troll may have accidentally asked something good. I said it before and I'll say it again--questions should be evaluated on their own merits, not taking OP's identity into account.
    – Mars
    Commented Mar 12, 2020 at 2:03
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    Does this answer your question? Why was this question about handling the fallout of a crass joke deleted?
    – gnat
    Commented Mar 12, 2020 at 22:46
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    @gnat: No, it doesn't. Not even close. Why did you vote to close my question? Were you bored? This is Meta.
    – Jim G.
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 1:51
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    your comments didn't make a compelling difference with duplicate to me, sorry. The differences I can see myself only support my understanding - unlike here the question discussed over there was positive score and on-topic and it was nevertheless mod deleted and the answer from Community Manager gives thourough reasoning for that (which seems to also apply here)...
    – gnat
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 9:02
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    ...twist it however you like but to me it looks like a standard handling of the fairly standard case: questions from troll accounts may be mod deleted irrespectively of score, answers, topicality etc. Other meta discussions linked to duplicate show that there were other prior cases of such mod-deletions and moderators referred to the same CM explanation linked in my prior comment
    – gnat
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 9:02
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    @gnat Still confused why you think this is a troll question. Or even if it is, why does it matter so much? Seems like a pefectly legitimate question that someone could ask. Why not just ignore it and move on? You're not even a mod.
    – user91988
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 15:55
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    @gnat: Until Neo weighed in, you had no idea. Please retract your close vote and let's call it a day. You are very quick to close questions.
    – Jim G.
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 22:25

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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This post was deleted because it was (is) part of a coordinated spam attack. We (in this case I) don't delete stuff for fun.

I cannot share any additional information beyond this.

Similar situation here

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  • 4
    Thanks. It's always good to know the actual reason, rather than just guessing.
    – Joe Strazzere
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 15:55
  • @JoeStrazzere We don't know the actual reason... just what gnat (whoever that is) says it is... He "cannot share any additional information beyond this"? Why?
    – user91988
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 15:56
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    @user91988 - pretty sure it's Neo that said what it is. Neo's a moderator and has my complete trust and support in this sort of matter.
    – Joe Strazzere
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 15:57
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    @user91988 I said why in my first sentence. You don't need any further information.
    – Neo
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 16:00
-4

The question was pretty obviously a troll post done to parody all the other recent "I love being antisocial" questions. Some previous troll posts were along these lines. Therefore people paying attention flagged it and the mods deleted it. Problem solved.

We should host real questions here. Troll questions aren't good because "they are not in and of themselves abusive." Answer a real person with that real problem, so that you get real details to address and help a real person in reality. It's a subset of people asking "theoretical" questions. Normally that'd be just closeable, but we want the trolls banned you see, so flag and delete is the remedy.

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    Is there so much traffic here that the troll is taking oxygen away from genuine questions? I don't think so. People will downvote low quality questions, there's no need to go on a troll hunt. Now we have 2 dedicated links in the side-bar about the troll so good job.
    – Eric Smith
    Commented Mar 11, 2020 at 21:51
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    So you are sad troll posts get deleted? Hmm. "Are there so many important things in the side-bar that there's a need to sweat me about it?" Apparently so.
    – mxyzplk
    Commented Mar 11, 2020 at 23:39
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    How do you know with such certainty that it is a troll post? And even if it was (lets assume magic 8th ball), I see very little wrong with the question, so why would it get deleted?
    – Aida Paul
    Commented Mar 12, 2020 at 16:57
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    Because I pay attention. And because apparently 5 other folks agreed with me. And for the reasons detailed in my answer already.
    – mxyzplk
    Commented Mar 12, 2020 at 18:18
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    I was one of those people - it didn't seem like a valid post to me at all
    – Gamora
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 9:35

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