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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".

Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.

I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible but then again, if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first.

EDIT:

By laziness I mean that there are known places (they know of) with documentation that cover what they need but they don't go there first and not something I have some deep domain knowledge of that would take them a long time to find or figure out.

I would personally still not reply with an AI answer but I am tempted sometimes...

View on HN

Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement.

He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).

It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.

Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.

The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.

I’ve encountered this regularly.

I love to learn. I never want to stop learning.

Apparently, I’m in a minority.

I have often offered to work with folks, and teach them how to develop shipping software. This is something I’m actually fairly good at, having done it, my entire career. I’m retired, now, but continue to develop shipping software. I often offer to do so, with others, so they can learn in an actual production context.

Valuable stuff. They could actually learn skills that could boost their own careers into LEO.

Instead, they invariably ask me to do it for them, or, more annoyingly, say they’ll do it, then never show up, and castigate me for going ahead without them.

Meta: This is why HN attracts curious people. They are rare. Finding and hiring them is hard. The forum cultivates for them, like gardeners tending a garden for pollinators. My best tip for hiring has always been "Hire curious people with a proven ability to build, get out of their way, and retain them as long as you can by meeting their professional expectations (comp, work experience, meaningful work, broadly speaking)."

Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments)

(strongly agree working with people who do not care or do not want to learn is soul crushing, engineer around it to the best of your ability, or change your operating environment to improve upon it, when able to; your time and energy is non renewable)

Thanks for that link.

I think one of my advantages has been, that I’m a high school dropout, with a GED. I never took a matriculated college course.

Almost all of my education has been practicum. I learn by do.

Having to direct my own education has been both liberating and exhausting.

I haven’t had any “tracks,” since I was 16.

I've struggled with this, even encountering people who basically say "if AI can do it why do I need to spend any more time?"

It was disappointing hearing someone tank their own prospect of career growth like that.

You're looking at human nature. We evolved to conserve energy, to take the berries that are growing right here rather than go foraging for something else with less certain outcomes. Even better, someone else collects the berries for you.

There are some exceptional people, who have the drive and curiosity to see what else is out there, but that's not the average.

You learn to know who are the lazy ones, and at that point you can politely always respond with a, "what were you able to find on this?". You can repeat this ad infinitum since at that point, they're just being lazy and disrespectful of your time. They eventually give up going to you because they know they won't get you to do their work for them.

Good point, and I realize that's what I did in school. When people came to me that I suspected were just looking for easy answers to avoid doing the work themselves, I'd lead them gradually through the chain of reasoning. Like, point out the first step and imply that that should be enough for them to work it out, leading them to ask again ("ok, I get that, but what does that mean for the final answer? What should I write down?"), and I'd give them the next step, leading them to walk away in disgust and bother somebody else. Even better, the next time they start with that person and it's no longer my problem.

Be high friction when you suspect it's warranted. Even if you're not sure someone is looking for a shortcut, the people who aren't won't mind. It's detection and deterrence rolled into one.

(And if possible, find a place to work where you never have to do this.)

If I remember right, it's called Socrates method of teaching, but in this case it's done in a malicious manner.

As someone who loves helping people to learn things for themselves... you have to identify these "help vampires" and just stop helping them.

I had a coworker who would ask me the same questions over and over and over, despite me trying to show them 10 different ways how to do it or find the answer in the docs or whatever. And eventually I just said I was too busy and they had to figure it out. After a while they actually started figuring stuff out.

Basically if those people aren't your direct reports, your obligation to help them only goes so far. Take care of yourself first. If they figure it out eventually then good for them. If not, it's really not your problem.

That's a great tip. Thanks for sharing.

I've done a similar thing with close friends and family who would constantly ask me things I couldn't possibly know because I always came up with an answer.

Eventually I realized why and explained, "you know, I'm really just going to do a web search for what you just asked me, and maybe a couple more until I have a decent answer and then give you that answer. Let me show you how I would go about that".

From then on, they started getting into the habit of doing that for themselves. I think now with LLMs, they've kept the habit, but the LLM gives a more complete answer with fewer steps so it becomes the default. I think the magic of AI is two-fold (well, more than two, but two bullets for this conversation).

1. You don't have to "query". You can just braindump, and it'll build a context and figure out what you're looking for

2. It's conversational, so instead of filtering and tweaking results from the first query, your second "query" builds on top of the context from the first question, and you get a stronger result as the conversation continues.

>He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).

I absolutely love this.

LMGTFY is an ironic jab, not a suggestion.

> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first

It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.

But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)

If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood.

If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.

That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise.

"I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.

> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?

Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.

Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself".

They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.

> after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.

Agreed, and I do the same. They still get a courteous reply, but they also feel a little "pain" when they don't get a timely answer - an effective teacher.

Not just the workforce, my parents still barely know how to use a computer because any time they hit the slightest snag, they immediately call me for help.

But as a good manager, you should throw it back: "what do you think?" "what have you tried so far?" etc.

Just giving them AI back is pointless. It means _your_ role is pointless.

Indeed - I had a team that called this "remote brain execution" (we were a build team that used Bazel, and often fielded questions about why someone's build broke).

My favorite phrase on that team was "What have you tried so far?"

Ironically, I have to edit out my "what I have tried so far" when asking questions, because I'm more likely to go into a long-winded explanation of the headers that I hacked and the kernel module I installed to fake my way around this or that, when the actual answer tends to be "uh... are you sure you're building the code you think you are? That sounds like you're running from the wrong directory or wrong branch."

But this is often simply not the case - people will often ask for trivial things trivially found on Google.

IME it usually means they have some good reason to ask, which you are not aware of. For example, people might believe you are an expert or can give a better answer in the context.

Yes, they might believe you are an expert, but they often ask "experts" trivial questions they should just have Googled. As evidenced by how just using Google to answer them will often make people think you are an expert even at topics you're clueless about.

Frankly I find it flattering when people asked me certain kinds of questions!

Maybe I’m just more generous with my time than others (or perhaps I don’t value it), but all these responses saying friends and colleagues asking you questions they could’ve theoretically looked up are “wasting your time” are rather perplexing. If somebody’s asking me, like you said, I generally assume they have a reason for asking. Or maybe they’re just tired and don’t want to spend an hour looking it up and verifying it because they know I have a quick answer that takes me little to no effort. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I get asked camera questions all the time, and frankly I just see those as opportunities to stay sharp. No better way to learn/reinforce your knowledge than teaching others

I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.

Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.

And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.

If you're telling them all that and not wasting their time, that's fine.

But if you just ask them the question and don't tell them what you've found or where you got stuck, you're asking them to stop doing what they're doing and spend all that same time you just spent working on your problem.

>> what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?

Because everyone has had that person who you help out, and become their path of least resistance to an answer. They are not looking for the BEST or a GOOD answer, just the least effort. It's completely reasonable to push back with "what have you tried so far?"

Then we should create LMGPTTFY, then it's at least apparent and the recipient needn't click.

https://letmegpt.com/

> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?

Usually because the question is very easily answered with a quick web search.

The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is:

"I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"

This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.

It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.

Let me Google that for you implies the answer is well known and trivial to find.

An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that

90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.

Maybe they don’t wanna take responsibility for that answer?

In our case we're completely allowed to use AI, but if you do, you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously). So if your LLM says "Sure, go ahead and run that code" and it deletes the production database, that's your fault, just as much as if you reviewed it manually and said the same thing.

> you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously)

why not in a legal sense? If someone asks me what cleaning supplies are safe to mix, and i just ask some chatbot, don't vet the output, copy the response, and they end up poisoning themselves, am I not responsible?

If I'm a lawyer, and pass unvetted AI legal advice to my client, and they go to jail, should i keep my license?

Typically if you develop a software product for a company, the company resumes responsibility. No one would develop anything for any high risk business, if they were to assume personal responsibility of the end result. LLMs don't really chance that, and any serious bug would be an error of process.

Developers are perfectly capable of creating dangerous or expensive mistakes even without LLMs. If we accept that LLMs are just tools, the developer should be no more responsible that if they choose to use Visual Studio over Vim and Visual Studio refactors something wrong.

Theres's then the question of gross incompetence, and were the developer could be fired or perhaps even sued by their employer, the same as if they hadn't used an LLM.

However the case I had in mind was in regards to the legality of the way the AI models acquire and reproduce code. We're not held personally responsible for any license violation created by the tool.

The personal responsibility is that you can lose the job which may not be as bad as getting sued but right now the market is quite tough so…

So, just a fake "yes"?

So I think it's a cultural thing.

I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.

On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.

I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.

For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.

No one here wants to say it, so I will.

A lot of people are relatively stupid.

If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.

Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.

If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?

It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. If you don't understand, you aren't smart enough to and shouldn't try? If you learn slow, just stop because you're... slower? What are you talking about?

Kind of.

Everyone needs to draw a line. Call it an "explore vs exploit" problem, if you want.

Sure, you want to fail a bit so you know where the line is, or to push it forwards a bit. But there is, at least in principal, always a line.

I'm just saying that if someone draws the line in a place that you think is waaaay too soon, maybe they aren't entirely wrong.

Ah, okay, that makes your original comment make more sense. Thank you for the clarification.

I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding.

Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.

It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me."

The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.

If you are really concerned with that, you should take a first stab at it, then ask AI to proofread it for you and change the tone if necessary. I have no problem with that; thinking was still done by a human, you just needed help proofreading, which has always been something that's valid to outsource.

> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".

Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.

The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).

You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.

People actively do that at work. My employer is a large [US] government financial entity, that likely holds your mortgage and the mortgage of people you know. Our profit this last quarter was publicly reported as 3.6 billion dollars. Most people will respond to any question with an OpenAI-generated answer, and you'll notice it most when 3 or 4 people in a teams chat all reply with a near-identical answer to a question you ask in the channel. I can't overstate how much AI is used here, or how zealous the leadership is in pushing us to use it for...everything.

Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.

Is it laziness? Or is it frustration from answering the same basic beginner questions over and over again?

It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. Then you can explain why your attempt to Google for the answer failed.

Of course that may be breaking down, as search engine results quality has declined dramatically in recent years.

> It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own.

In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.

In my line of work, its certain peoples' jobs to know certain things. If I need a piece of information that somebody else is responsible for understanding, I'm just going to ask directly for what I need instead of trying to research it myself. To research it myself would mean attempting to do somebody else's job, which is just unhelpful for everyone.

There is a line between "somebodies job to know" and you just being too lazy to look at the documentation/do basic research.

That experience is better characterized as unprofessional, then. ;)

It may not be laziness, but it is definitely entirely lacking in empathy.

Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction?

There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.

I’m using ai to answer questions, but I instruct it in draft what answers to include, what info to include from my llm wiki (second brain). Saves time to write a correct response, can easily refer to past conversations, but definitely not 100% outsources to AI.

If you need to find information to answer a colleague, use AI if that's helpful.

I have no idea why anyone would let an AI dictate the response - you lose your entire voice and depersonalize your response. Do you keep a markdown of your communication style and past inside jokes? Or did you start so early with AI that you dont even have those to keep?

Because it’s often hard to find the right voice? because it’s often hard to describe something in the correct way? Communication is hard, finding the correct tone of voice often takes me a long time, so using AI makes me more efficient in a busy day?

That "hardness" is what brings value to the interaction, in almost every sense of value except "speed", and with AI, speed is suspect because of the investment imbalance - it's too easy to prompt for a response then fire that response and expect the reader to do the hard work.

I notice you didn't use an AI to debate this, just as I didn't use an AI to refute it. Does this make the interaction more or less meaningful for you? That you cared enough to actually read and reply, and I did, too? I didn't have too reply, nor did you, but we felt the need to exchange ideas together, not spawn agents to fight.

I don’t care who wrote it, as long as it is a good message, communicating what the sender intents to communicate, well articulated. I prefer it above a self written piece that is hard to understand, contains unclear wording, and could be interpreted in an incorrect way.

Not everyone is gifted with the ability to write well, so using tools to achieve that is no shame in my opinion. And no, practicing more is not always going to get you to a higher, sufficient level. We all have our limitations that cannot be crossed by just practicing more. Practice does not make Einstein.

I quite often send messages where I later think “i should have phrased it differently, maybe it was misunderstood”. And often I’ll respond way too late because lack of time.

I feel AI is a tool that helps me communicate better, and I expect that holds for many others as well.

Not understanding that some feel more effective using tools is also a sign of lack of empathy.

You're expressing your opinion, I'm expressing mine.

And you're leading me on a long goose chase here. We started with LMGTFY and are now debating whether some people can study to the point that they can reach AI levels of writing quality (absolutely yes they can, btw), and whether they need to because you, personally, would rather talk to an AI because you have in the past experienced anxiety about messages you have sent.

If you like using AI to communicate, just consider taking into account the various comments here and in above thread, from the people you likely work with or will work with, saying that using LLMs to craft messages for you is fraught with danger of coming off the wrong way and pushing your reader away.

I have nothing else really to say about it, this has been a really consistent thread.

The examples in the article are questions the AI did not know the answer to though. So hardly "basic beginner"

Laziness and "Memetic Imprinting" of the inevitability where the ultimate attack vectors.

Robot experience this tragic irony for me

I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.

The bigger issue I feel is knowing the medium for the question/help you need. If you need their experience and knowledge then talk to them. Email as a medium is already a wrong choice most of the time in these situations. Expecting them to give you the context that helps you grow from their experience in an email is placing a huge burden on them.

The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good.

The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result...

With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.

IMO, its a little jab/playful when a friend sends a LMGTFY link and its really disrespectful if a colleuage sends it

I already feel disrespected if a colleague makes me feel like sending it. If a friend tells me to get him a beer from the fridge because they're too lazy to get up, 7/10 times I'm going to do it. They're not going to be insulted when I don't because they know that they don't deserve anything, and they'll probably more often than not get up if I asked them the same thing.

If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up.

edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.

If you feel the need to hide how you got the answer then you know something is wrong.

> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.

Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.

If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice.

> I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible

This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.

> And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.

Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop.

Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".

Can you not say "sorry but I think you should try Claude first" and send the slop next? If someone treated me like that I'd either look for a new job, walk to their desk and do conflict management, or try to work out how I'd offended them.

Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.

"conflict management" before "try to work out how I'd offended them."

Let me Claude that for you.

>If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.

Isn't it better just to tell them that instead of passive aggressively continuing the cycle? Granted, though, harder to navigate.

If you tell somebody to go google it, you are being incredibly rude 95% of the time. That is pretty widely understood

Sure, but asking someone something that should be easily answered in a few seconds is also rude.

Programming is an intense job, in that it takes a lot of focus and time to build up a mental model of what you're working on to make progress

I highly doubt you never ask questions that you could’ve looked up yourself. “Go Google it” translates to “this isn’t worth my time,” which is a pretty rude way to be.

But sometimes it isn't worth my time. If I'm being asked something about what I'm working on, fair enough. If I'm being asked what a command-line switch for curl does (and that's not related to what I'm doing) the total cost is less to look at the docs, rather then asking me to look at the docs.

Not weighing my time and effort into the equation is rude on behalf of the asker.

Nobody said you must answer any and all questions sent your way or that everyone is allowed to dismiss the value of your time. We’re veering away from the original discussion here.

What I'm trying to say is that the cost of answering the question might look like 30 seconds to the person asking.

What really happened is, you context switch, answer a mundane question, and now spend 30 minutes to get back to the mental state that you were in that made you productive

There’s a difference between “people should not ask me questions they can look up” and “people should know when it is an appropriate time to ask questions.”

if they aren't presenting proof of doing research or they don't have the benefit of doubt (e.g. a new hire, etc.) they're being rude by not doing the research in the first place.

I’m sorry but nobody behaves this way. Nobody sits around in every conversation showing their homework/proving they tried to find an answer before asking somebody else. It is incredibly common to just ask somebody a question and expect an answer regardless if you could’ve looked up yourself.

It’s important to not make everybody do your research for you, but what you’re describing is not at all typical.

It's not typical but it's how you should personally act.

You aren't going to be able to convince others to be upstanding coworkers that actually give a damn, but you can be that person yourself.

I'm not particularly sorry, but when I ask questions out of the blue over email or chat, I always explain what I've already tried. The two exceptions are when it's urgent, in which case I briefly explain the urgency ("prod is down did you deploy just now?"), or when it's part of an ongoing conversation.

If this is not typical for you, then you are surrounded by people who disrespect you and your time.

> I'm not particularly sorry

Yes that seems rather consistent with your attitude.

As for the rest, you are drastically narrowing the scope

steelman, don't strawman. pushback on someone being rude by requesting something they could have looked up doesn't look like "let me google that for you" 95% of the time. it's far more likely to come out as "I'm not sure, honestly. I worked on X, but I didn't really need to get in to Y, so I'm not as familiar. Personally, I'd just do a google search, since I'm a little behind on that."

not rude. not implying anything about the questioner. still the general sentiment of "google it; that's not my job". if you admonish people as being "incredibly rude", you should be talking about things that people actually do with enough regularity to make the point worth making. that is pretty widely understood.

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