
It's Time to Retire “RTFM” - rbanffy
https://compassionatecoding.com/blog/2019/4/17/its-time-to-retire-rtfm
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luckylion
No, let's not.

Yeah, you can invent a new phrase (but that won't help, if RTFM becomes
"carefully reading the documentation again", then that will start to
implicitly carry the same shame and we'll play musical chairs with words until
the next term is tainted too), but telling somebody to Google the error
message or read the documentation is a valid response.

Especially on StackOverflow, there's an endless stream of no-effort-questions
of the "I want this done, please do it for me" variety. Typing out an essay of
why it's better if you invest some time yourself every time doesn't scale. You
downvote/flag the question, and if you want to be helpful, you tell the person
why they won't get help: because they didn't care enough about their problem
to RTFM or GTFE (Google The Fucking Error) and everybody else cares even less
than they do. And yes, you often can tell whether somebody googled the error
or not.

I don't recall ever seeing "RTFM" responses to legitimate questions, plenty of
people take time out of their days to explain why things aren't working and
how they could work.

Don't retire RTFM, RTFM before asking. Once you do, either the problem goes
away or you can state what you don't understand / where your understanding
doesn't get you the expected result.

The stretch of suffering and overemphasizing of empathy in the article makes
me think the author hasn't spent a lot of time actually engaging with
questions on SO.

~~~
CyberFonic
It is very hard to empathetic when under pressure to get difficult stuff done
by a deadline and some lazy person wastes your time by asking questions that
they could have looked up instead of being a distraction.

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CyberFonic
I think that the situations are far more nuanced than the article suggests. A
couple of specific scenarios come to mind:

In a workplace, helping coworkers gain greater competence is a given only to
the extent that the person asking for help has actually done some research
before asking their question. However, there are coworkers who are basically
lazy and expect others to pick up their slack. These are often rather crafty
and make their managers think better of them than their coworkers. Like Wally
of the Dilbert strips.

On forums, e.g. StackOverflow, the noise generated by lazy askers makes it
hard to find relevant answers. Perhaps there could be a newbie's corner to
which questions could be relegated. Personally, I don't see the point of
answering poorly researched questions even with a "RTFM".

When Googling, I often get frustrated by the mass of newbie questions and the
resulting nasty answers. There doesn't seem to be any way to specify "guru
class Q&A".

Compared to many forum sites, I actually find SO and its siblings to be far
more useful. Perhaps it is the reputation system that helps identify the
stronger contributors.

