This might be the rationale, but it's fundamentally very wrong. In the vast majority of "programming/tech discussion/help" spaces I frequent, the response to this is almost always going to be: "Maybe, ask your question."

It turns out that, a significant percentage of the time, the "preconditions" for the question are either: - Way too specific (i.e. yes, even a non java expert knows what "nullpointerexception" means) - Not nearly specific enough (i.e. no, I know Java but your issue is from a specific library with 1 page of documentation from the 90's)

This, in my opinion, is exactly what makes the 'asking to ask' so frustrating. It's impossible to know if I can answer your question without actually knowing what the question is. And if I ask what the question is, now I'm the one uncomfortable with the situation when it turns out to be something I can't help with.

edit: I also feel like it's worth noting, I'm aware that formulating a good question takes time and effort; however, in the "asking for help" / "giving help" scenario, it's very much common courtesy to do the most you can to enable people to help you. We want to help! But please ask a good question. (I do totally understand that asking good questions is a hard thing to learn, though! I started out asking very poor questions and slowly learned over time.)

Or in a broader context someone does know about. Or maybe someone's just better at getting things out of google.

For example, I once helped a co-worker who was having trouble with a toy webserver written in Go as a learning exercise. It wasn't recognizing url paths that it should have. I don't know Go, but did recognize the problem from our apache/wsgi django setup - path prefixes being stripped. Knowing the right keywords to search for, I was able to find the fix for a config file and we got it working.

> Asking "Any Java experts around?" takes little effort

which is precisely why this is annoying: it's asking for a social commitment without putting any effort in. It also reaches for the top shelf for no reason. Does the person's question really need a Java "expert"? Probably not.

> A "no" response for the first question could save you from wasting your time with the second.

Arguably if they were to find help _anywhere_ they would benefit from articulating their question in a clear and concise way. Let alone the high probability that through writing the question they might answer their own question, because we're all humans.

> A "no" response for the first question could save everyone from wasting their time with the second.

That “no” is never going to happen though. Every individual might know that they aren’t a Java expert, but they don’t know that every other individual is also not an expert. So there is nobody in a position to answer “no”.

> That “no” is never going to happen though. Every individual might know that they aren’t a Java expert, but they don’t know that every other individual is also not an expert. So there is nobody in a position to answer “no”.

A lack of response is equivalent to a "no." I suppose I could have phrased it more clearly, but my though is the asker would wait for an affirmative response to proceed with investing more into asking the question.

> A lack of response is equivalent to a "no."

It’s not though. I routinely ignore questions like this for questions where I am one of the experts, but I would quite often reply to a real question in the same situation.

How long are they going to wait? On low traffic asynchronous chats it's not unusual to get an answer 12 hours later, especially when the chat spans timezones.

I appreciate when people react with a "no" emoji so I know they read the question and I should try elsewhere.

> A "no" response for the first question could save everyone from wasting their time with the second.

If I have a question that takes time to write up, I'll need to spend that time either way. Better to write the question up front so I can copy/paste it wherever I need until I get the help I need than to ask "any Java experts around" and proceed to waste anyone who responds' time while they wait for me to actually compose the question.