This story sounds quite a lot like a few experiences I had.
Years ago (more than I'd like to admit), I took to playing Travian with friends and coworkers. Travian is an RTS, where 'Realtime' really means 'Real-Time'! If you attack the town next to you, just a few squares away, it can take 5 hours for your troops to arrive and the battle to ensue.
It was the perfect game; you could play it casually, in between stuff at work during the day, or on break, or in the evening.
My friends started getting really into it and spending a lot more time on it. I did not want to spend more time playing it, but it was a fun game. The makers of Travian did something interesting, though - they would dump one database table with city data every night for people to do interesting things with. My friends were using a bunch of these tools already, but I perceived some opportunity to build tools which didn't yet exist - like a tool which let you discover inactive accounts to pillage. I starting building more and more tools, eventually starting to write a bot to play the game for me, by automatically raiding inactive accounts and automatically building up my current towns to avoid appearing inactive. My goal in doing this wasn't to play the game per se, but to learn and get better at programming.
So I made the mistake of mentioning all this to another friend who was playing Travian. He was interested. I told him if I ever finished, he could try out the bot, but in the meantime he could use the rest of my tools.
Well, he got impatient waiting for the bot (which btw, I never finished, but I did learn some cool stuff from the experience). He decided he was going to 'help' me, by group calling me with another programmer friend of his who first of all quizzed me on how I was building it, and telling me I was doing it the wrong way and that I needed to use different languages, frameworks, messaging layers, etc. Yeah, so now that I am way further in my career, that guy was dead wrong and an idiot who was trying to overcomplicate everything. But the point was - he didn't want to help, he wanted to stroke his own ego by fixing (or as the case may be, fucking up) some other idiot's project.
This actually really strained my relationship with my friend. Huge dick move, and one that took me a long time to forgive him for. Stay out of my personal projects! To me, it felt along the lines of hearing about an argument with my wife, and then unbidden forcing me to take a call with a relationship coach who told me I was a bad husband.
It was the perfect game; you could play it casually, in between stuff at work during the day, or on break, or in the evening.
My friends started getting really into it and spending a lot more time on it. I did not want to spend more time playing it, but it was a fun game. The makers of Travian did something interesting, though - they would dump one database table with city data every night for people to do interesting things with. My friends were using a bunch of these tools already, but I perceived some opportunity to build tools which didn't yet exist - like a tool which let you discover inactive accounts to pillage. I starting building more and more tools, eventually starting to write a bot to play the game for me, by automatically raiding inactive accounts and automatically building up my current towns to avoid appearing inactive. My goal in doing this wasn't to play the game per se, but to learn and get better at programming.
So I made the mistake of mentioning all this to another friend who was playing Travian. He was interested. I told him if I ever finished, he could try out the bot, but in the meantime he could use the rest of my tools.
Well, he got impatient waiting for the bot (which btw, I never finished, but I did learn some cool stuff from the experience). He decided he was going to 'help' me, by group calling me with another programmer friend of his who first of all quizzed me on how I was building it, and telling me I was doing it the wrong way and that I needed to use different languages, frameworks, messaging layers, etc. Yeah, so now that I am way further in my career, that guy was dead wrong and an idiot who was trying to overcomplicate everything. But the point was - he didn't want to help, he wanted to stroke his own ego by fixing (or as the case may be, fucking up) some other idiot's project.
This actually really strained my relationship with my friend. Huge dick move, and one that took me a long time to forgive him for. Stay out of my personal projects! To me, it felt along the lines of hearing about an argument with my wife, and then unbidden forcing me to take a call with a relationship coach who told me I was a bad husband.