Title: Looking Stupid v Being Stupid

If I get contributions along the lines of 'My Worst Mistake' I would like to start a new feature similar to 'From the Coalface' and 'Tales of the Linker' but where it is your mistakes that you write about. Like the aforementioned the feature will be strictly anonymous to protect you from stupid employers.

I recently asked for an account on a (graduate) student-run machine here in Cambridge, and the response was something like "Given the anecdotes you told me last week, No". The anecdotes were mistakes I had made on Unix machines in the past, such as launching one process on the undergraduate teaching system for each Chinese character (although not all at the same time). (This exposed a race condition in the NFS automounter and brought the whole thing down.)

A similar thing could happen in an employment setting. If an employer is aware of the mistakes you have made in the past, your chances of employment might go down. This sort of thing is why I deleted the "blunders" section on my web page that quite a few people enjoyed. (You have to watch what you put on your web pages, because it's too easy to click on a URL in someone's signature. I'm not 100% sure that what I've got up at the moment is going to do me any good either. Maybe I'd better disable the signature if I apply anywhere.)

This is also probably why we don't get many articles on "here's how I totally messed up my work - don't you do the same". Now the question is: Would the employer rather take someone who has made no mistakes to someone who has made many? What if the former has had no experience and therefore no opportunity to make the mistakes, or simply hasn't experimented so much? I'm using employment as an example, but I mean any situation where a person is judged.

The person who has made many mistakes is perhaps less likely to repeat them, but gains a reputation as someone who "does stupid things". And that is what people are afraid of. The whole thing is based on the false assumption that the person about whom you know nothing is better than the one whose fallacies you can see.

On local university newsgroups, I often get flamed along the lines of "I wish you wouldn't post news because you're so clueless". It seems I'm not the only one who gets this treatment (although it only seems to happen on local newsgroups). Everything's got to be perfect before you start. No wonder people around here don't write for C Vu.

Incidentally, a while ago I asked one of the flamers if he knew why my C++ program went wrong, and he gave me this advice:

At this point I no longer felt so depressed. I then explained (politely and unpatronisingly) why this change was not likely to make a difference to the runtime behaviour, and in response I got "Learn a different language" in fairly strong terms.

If anyone is abstaining from writing for ACCU due to being conditioned by flamers (and yes, they can really discourage you and make you feel worthless), I hope my experience has reassured you that they are not always as Superior as they think.

If I were to say what gives me the courage to write articles, fundamentally it's the thought that I'm contributing something that could make a positive difference despite its being imperfect. I'm not going to wait until I'm perfect before I write anything (if I did, ACCU would probably cease to exist first). I know I'm not perfect, I know that the readers know I'm not perfect, I know that some of them may be able to correct me and I know that this itself can generate valuable material. Even on local newsgroups, I have been an indirect cause of good decisions being made even though the result for me was to get flamed to cinders. Had I remained silent, the discussion would not have happened and neither would its outcome. And ACCU is a much better atmosphere than those newsgroups.

If you want to get more confidence at writing before you start, one thing you can do is to read more articles. The more you read, the more your mind feels at home in the medium. And if you have something that may be of interest to others, there is no reason to tremble at sending it in. If you're shy, anonymous publishing is always a possibility, as is requesting that your material be reviewed or evaluated by someone more experienced before it is published.

The thing to realise is that others are humans just like yourself, facing similar problems and understanding you as you understand them. Their mission in life is not to trip you up. Think what you would do if you saw someone else's imperfect article, then reverse roles and ask yourself if you mind being in that position. It probably isn't as bad as you thought.