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On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 12:02 AM, Julian Hall <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> That being said, I can't abide lazy people who expect to be spoonfed, and
> again I agree with bad apple. If someone asked 'How do I do X?' where X is
> very simple and shows no sign of having tried to work it out, my answer may
> well be to look it up on Google and furnish them with the url.
One thing you're forgetting, I think, is that being a newcomer to a
field often means that you don't know the terminology. And, let's face
it, we do like our obscure terminology in this game. A lot of my job
involves usability testing and UX design, and I've lost count of the
number of times that designs that seemed perfectly reasonable to dev
teams or clients who knew what they were talking about were completely
baffling to users who hadn't yet got enough of the shared mental
model. "JFGI" is a reasonable response if the questioner knows which
words to Google for. If not, I think it's a perfectly rational
strategy to ask people who will know - or can work out - what you mean
in the local technical argot.
A related aspect of this is that, very often, blog posts etc that
might give you the answer to "how do I do X?" aren't titled in terms
of the problem ("How do I do X?") but in terms of the solution ("How
to install the finangle service on Ubuntu 12.10"). This makes it
harder to find the information you might be looking for, unless you
already know the (terminology of) the answer. Admittedly,
StackOverflow and the other StackExchange sites have been making this
less of a problem in recent years, precisely because the topics are
titled in terms of the issue not the answer.
Tl;dr: sometimes "lazy" people are just confused and desperate people.
Ian
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