But there are a significant percentage of users who can't (or won't) read documentation. Even they do manage to read it, they don't understand it.
For some reason, human interaction works better for those people. They ask a question, and someone copies the answer from the documentation, and pastes it into the chat conversation. The user then goes "Oh, wow! That's helpful!"
But ask them to read a web page, and they get lost.
I would love to know the psychology behind this phenomenon.
Screw the lazy users who won't look up documentation. If you can't read docs (he is a computer science professor), then do you really aren't in the right subject.
Laziness. It's usually faster to ask someone a question than to look up the answer. I used to do this on IRC when learning a new programming language and it saved me a lot of time. If you want an even faster answer, you guess the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law).
:(
My common answer is "If you're too lazy to read the documentation, I'm too lazy to cut & paste it into the email".
Followed by them complaining about how I'm an asshole...
Eventually I LMGTFY. He stopped asking.
Sure, you might get the answer that X is the best way to do what you're trying to do, but if you read the docs, you might learn that what you're trying to do with X is already implemented and you can skip all that and just use Y. ( you not meaning you specifically here, just in general. )
On my school's forum, people routinely ask questions which a simple Google search would have answered.
Yet typing out a question and posting it to a forum is a lot more work than searching on Google. I'd think the lazy response would be to stick to Google.
The time pressure is the source of all sorts of sub-optimal issues - "I don't have time to write tests, documentation, do the right thing here ... Whatever. Including reading around the subject"
I do think modern corporate culture contributes to this - I remember being impressed by a PhD DSP guy who was in my scrum stand up who most days would report "I was reading yesterday and will be reading today". Every so often he would say "I finished reading and wrote ten lines that solved the problem"
As a contractor I felt I could not take a similar response, but I should ... or at least should be "I will be refactoring our Dbase access code / Our API / whatever cos it sucks rocks"
But I am weak.
Oh and resentment - "I don't want to find out the details of the pointless process this pathological bureaucracy has created and I really don't want to read a badly written set of documentation that probably does not have the real answers in it because no one likes to write the honest answers"
Hmm, glad it's Friday. I am worse than usual
Situation 1: "Hey can you call me?" Sure, what do you need to talk about? "The status of the Spark server." Okay.
Find a quiet place, place the call, debug connection problems so we can hear each other.
So what do you need? "Is the Spark server up?" Yes. "Okay, thanks, bye."
Situation 2: Email to coworker: "Hey the other day you said you said that the downloaded certificate is one factor, so with the password, that's already two factors, and the rotating token would be three. But we only need two, so that would mean we don't need the rotating token now. But the CTO is confused then -- how was the certificate securely transmitted in the first place, to the point that we can count it as a second factor?"
Two days later: Coworker approaches me: "So what was that email about?"
(Only exaggerating a little bit.)
I can show you writing a lot worse than that!
May I suggest running it through HemingwayApp[1] yourself and seeing that this particular email is objectively hard to read?
Write emails (and internet comments) like the reader is a drunk 7 year old. That's about as much attention as they're giving your email.
You also haven't explained what makes it horrible rather than so-so, which is important, since it's fairly easy to make it worse. You really can't just count words and dots and call it a day.
And if someone isn't going to read an email, but ask you to repeat it verbally, they really don't belong in an office environment. I'm sure that doesn't describe you!
Hey the other day you said you said that the downloaded certificate is one factor, so with the password, that's already two factors, and the rotating token would be three.
But the CTO is confused then -- how was the certificate securely transmitted in the first place, to the point that we can count it as a second factor?
The email's reading level is at grade 11 on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. [1] Anything above 9 is considered "Fairly difficult to read". Best selling authors tend to score less than 9. A lot less.
You don't need to write emails like you were a best selling author of course. That's silly. But it helps if you write them for the recipient. Don't just word vomit your train of thought.
Here's how I'd write your email (from what I can guess/understand of the situation):
Hey,
The other day we talked about auth factors in our app. You said the certificate was one factor.
Adding the password, that makes two. A rotating token would make three.
Do we really need the rotating token, then?
But the CTO is confused: how do we know the certificate transmitted securely? It can't be an auth factor if we're not sure.
Cheers,
~Bla
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
[2] https://contently.com/strategist/2015/01/28/this-surprising-...
At a minimum, each sentence is doing too much.
Another thing you might consider is that there are class and cultural factors to people's expectations about how you get along in life. Person to person conversation and personal relationships are important resources if you are working class or living in poverty.
There is a flip side to culture that disdains just asking, which is that smart people sometimes scramble to find answers independently to any questions because they don't want to reveal their ignorance on a subject. Sometimes just asking is not lazy, it is efficient and results in better collaboration as other people hear the question and realize they don't know, either, and would like to. Or, if no one knows, then you at least know have that information and can work from there.
(I teach a largish introductory university class)
Or heck, just make it a policy that if they haven't received an answer in a week, this means they need to look at the website. I don't know why some people strive to be so accommodating to laziness nowadays.
I'm not sure if the former is that virtuous. Those people look like they are growing completely helpless.
Most technology is fundamentally about accommodating laziness. There's nothing "nowadays" about it.
You don't have to be an asshole, just refuse to be mistreated by assholes.
I've seen a friend of mine, who is a university teacher, respond at midnight to stupid question about some deadline the student should have known since two months. If your experience is anything like that, know that there are people finding it insane.
Students should be capable of reading text. If they can't, they belong in kindergarten, not university.