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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

> what’s the equivalent of “google it yourself” these days?

Do you actually say that to people?

Edit: i’ve hit the comment limit per given time, but all I have to say is “what have you found so far?” And “Google it yourself” are radically different responses man. The former is far more reasonable, it shows you are willing to be helpful and is a productive question. The other is just rude and implies your time is too valuable as well as assumes they’ve done nothing to tackle the problem. If you actually say “Google it yourself” when people ask you a question that would be absolutely bizarre behavior.

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People are lazy as hell, and I've noticed it's getting worse. My old team called this "remote brain execution" (because we work with Bazel and they have something called RBE) where folks would just drop questions in Slack and just ask the team to solve it for them. We were taken aback by how little work people would do before doing this. We developed the phrase: "What have you tried so far?" to try and counteract this culture, but it was an uphill battle, people didn't seem to have shame in saying "Absolutely nothing. I just need to get my job done, and you're holding me up!"

I try to give people a little leeway here, even if I get annoyed in the moment. I know that I myself have dropped a question in chat and continued to look elsewhere for the answer. It’s always a good idea to see if someone else has a quick answer to avoid spinning your wheels for hours looking in the wrong direction.

I like to point people toward ESR’s “how to ask questions the smart way” [0] to new people as it takes some work to learn that questions are about investigations and collaboration, not tasking.

[0] https://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

In many cases someone else already knows the answer and your interruption of them is less time lost for the company than you looking up the answer.

Unless the organisation is on the brink of collapse there is valuable learning and understanding in honestly attempting the research. If nothing else one gets a bit more knowledge on how to research the topic, although some knowledge of the state of the field is hard to avoid if you're so new to it that it's resource intensive to research.

For the company it would probably pay off better (over time) to let the people who regularly get stuck after trying nothing spend some energy figuring out than what they get in return for shipping them to conferences.

Sometimes. However there are a lot of things that I know that are not worth your time to know. Somebody else in the company should also become an expert (for bus factor reasons), but it isn't what the company does and so spending time going deep on that topic isn't worth it.

I’m sorry dude but if it’s going to take me two hours of sorting through documentation to find a feature in the software I’m using and I know someone one Slack message away could point me to it in 30 seconds, I’m going to ask them. You’re basically making a case against any sort of technical collaboration outside of one where everyone comes to the table with all of their knowledge set and prepared to look up everything themselves. That is very inefficient and simply not how people operate, not even you do that

No, it's more like a basic case where you put five minutes into it and if you can't get there in that time frame, then you ask someone. But I am asking for the five minutes of work.

Why do you operate under the assumption that people haven’t spent a few minutes looking for it? In my experience, most people are not trying to waste my time. Perhaps that is different for you, but I find that unlikely.

Additionally, when it’s not your domain knowledge, research is more difficult and time consuming. It can be difficult to even know where to begin. Someone new to media production, for instance, wouldn’t know the major forums to check off hand. Someone had to tell me about dvxuser, reduser, cinema5d, etc.

We learn through a combination of our own effort efforts and the help of others. Otherwise why would we even have school?

These are software engineers asking questions about the code they wrote. They're able to figure it out.

Politely? — yes, all the time.

A frequent first question when a subordinate asks me for help:

“What have you found so far, searching for answers?”

"RTFM" was a common answer to an obvious question, back in the day.

If your question shows that you haven't done basic research, because your question would be answered by the most basic of research (like reading that entry in the manual), then you're wasting my time with your laziness. That might be regarded as deserving a bit of rudeness in the answer. (The exception is with someone who is so new that they don't even realize that there is a manual, but that should be very rare.)

I mean, hopefully I've grown up a bit, and grown more patient a bit, but I still understand why people reply that way.

> If your question shows that you haven't done basic research

You added this to the conversation. That was not the original discussion.

Also you and I both have absolutely asked people questions we could have looked up but we knew they likely knew offhand. I don’t understand why some of you think your time is so precious that’s every single question ever asked of you must meet some minimum, arbitrary bar you’ve set internally before you deign to come down from the mountain and bestow knowledge upon your friends and family.

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=do+people+say+google+it+yourself

Thanks for reminding me of lmgtfy. We used to say that all the time 20 years ago, and it was way politer than how the people older than us spoke. It took some getting used to, but I really miss the hilariously mean bluntness of the IT/tech world.

In retrospect, I think it was just a bunch of people who grew up breathing in leaded gas fumes, with undiagnosed mental disorders. But I miss it just the same.

Absolutely revisionist history.

That was never an acceptable thing to do outside of light hearted joking. You’d do that to a colleague or someone asking for help in earnest?

It’s a deliberate, rude act that is aggressively proclaiming “how dare you waste my time.“ God help you if you ever ask a question you could’ve looked up yourself, because of course you never do that right? You always make sure to engage in rigorous scholarly research before daring to bother somebody.

Deliberate rude acts were very common in my first few jobs. I distinctly remember multiple directors asking people "Are you a fucking moron?", and much worse. This was both at small companies and fortune 200s. The rude cranky IT guy is a trope for a reason. Learning to return the hostility, while proving that you do indeed know what you're talking about, was a rite of passage.

I almost just said it was like working with The Sopranos or Dr House, but now that I think about it maybe that's because I was in Jersey?

If your workplace resembled house, one of the most ridiculous, overdramatized medical shows that routinely displayed casual illegal acts and brushed them off like nothing, then you should understand that your worklife closely resembled fiction and nobody should work in a workplace like that. He was an addict who abused his colleagues and subordinates.

How on earth are you using an absurd work of fiction as a good thing and then justifying treating people like shit at work? People don’t want to be cursed and yelled at and personally insulted at work and they shouldn’t have to deal with that.

I didn't say it was a good thing, I said I missed it.

As I think about it, I guess I really just miss people being more authentic. There was a lot more understanding and forgiveness around unmedicated emotional outbursts. Modern work culture is more polite on the surface, but it feels like everyone is a cut throat politician manipulating their way to the top with a dumb fake smile. I would much rather work with someone who is upfront about their plans and how they're feeling, than someone who is friendly to my face while talking shit behind my back.

I do kinda feel bad for the kids that are entering the workforce, expected to act like emotionless robots, while spending most of their time talking to AI. There is an underlying sense of fear that they have to mask themselves to not be fired.

But yes, it is an overall improvement. I did have one truly abusive boss that was able to hide unchecked within that culture, and I would not wish that experience on anyone. The rest were just normal people that were emotional and funny.

Apologies for the intensity of my previous comment. It read to me like you were saying this was a good thing and something we should all want, which was just very striking to me. I probably should have asked you to clarify rather than react to my interpretation.

I understand what you’re saying, it is fun to kind of have a little bit more of an honest, “in the trenches” culture. I miss that from time to time from my work on film sets. But I can also say that the lows professionally were far lower as a result, as those blurry boundaries can cause much more friction and even harm people. So I just have a kind of a strong opinion on that

Yeah, came here to see if anyone still remembers lmgtfy. Back to the future, I guess!

> what have you found so far?

Love it, thank you!

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