Saying "I'm new at this" doesn't add value to the question, but it does add context for answers. Assuming that the question is fine either way, knowing that someone is very new can change the way I present an answer. For example:
Ok, I'm really new to Foobar programming. I'm trying to do with salmon: blah blah blah fishcakes
but I'm getting an error that says carp unavailable
, why is that?
vs.
I've been working on a large Foobar project and I'm getting a carp unavailable
error from a statement with salmon: blah blah blah fishcakes
. I'm probably missing something obvious here, but I'm not sure what.
In the former case, I'd explain that fishcakes
actually means a pureed mixture of all fish that are in scope, so they need to explicitly hide the carp
if all they want is salmon cakes. For the latter, I'd ask "did you mean something like with salmon, hiding carp: ...
" to remind them of what they've overlooked, rather than explain something they already know.
On the other hand, if the question is bad and should be closed, it doesn't matter whether the user is a newbie.