It’s frustrating in online communities when someone asks a technical question and is met with an interrogation instead of an answer, on the assumption that they don’t know what they want to do.

You’ll find that technical questions from experienced people tend to include “To do X, I’m doing…”. Basically for two reasons: They’re already accustomed to zooming out and looking for other approaches before even asking a question, aren’t lost in the weeds, therefore asking the question top-down is natural, secondly, because they can predict the inevitable “you don’t actually want to do this” answers if the approach is even a little bit off the beaten path.

Consider the flipside: Helpful people wasting their and your time teaching you how to build a flux compensator when all you wanted to do was make some coffee. Just buy a machine off the shelf. Interrogating, alas, is warranted in the majority of cases that’s why it became a thing in the first place because most people aren’t trying to engineer a novel flux-compensated coffee machine.