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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

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!"

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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.

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