charge along : Java Glossary

charge along: a technique first explicitly formulated by the late Tom Meikle for persuading experts to give you information they would normally be too impatient to provide and for worming proprietary trade secrets out of people. There are two variants the rude and the polite. To use the rude form, you privately or publicly post something of this form:"You, Ms. Expert are totally incompetent. Obviously your statements are patently false." Ms. Expert then wants to put this insolent puppy in his place. So she spends an hour composing a detailed reply point by point meticulously defending her position and in the process explaining it in great detail. To use the polite form, you privately or publicly post something to the effect "Here is my understanding of how X works. It might work via option a… or option b… or perhaps something entirely different. However, my thinking now is I believe it works via option a." If you guessed incorrectly the experts will have an uncontrollable itch to correct you. They can’t stand the thought of misinformation being disseminated. By doing the work of elaborating some possible options, you save the expert time. She can answer with multiple choice. She also has a clearer idea of your level of expertise so she knows how terse she can be in her reply. So if somebody flames you, you can reframe that (as the NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) people would say) into a compliment. Perhaps they consider you an expert and are just trying to worm information out of you using the charge along technique.

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