Programmer Humor

How is labeling a bug report that is based on user ignorance a lack of empathy? It's just sometimes factual that users are still learning and make mistakes, and I say this as a low skill FOSS user and enthusiast.

Yeah, users might get a bit upset about "abrasive devs" but like, as you said, it's devs that give their free time and energy into developing the project. Users honestly ought to respect that a lot more

The good old ID-10-T error

I don't work on networking but I'll be adopting this from now on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8

I just say the problem is between keyboard and chair.

Sometimes software is "self documenting", either in use, or in the code (or both).

Sometimes software just gets called "self documenting", like i'ts an excuse to not write good documentation.

Pee Easy Bro, Kangaroos Aren't Coming

RTFHC (Run The Fucking Help Command)

I'd say "sure!" Then amaze them with how good and quick I am by telling them an hour or two later to "try it now "

What you describe sounds more like a "competence" issue than a skill issue - can't have the latter without first having the former.

i agree if anything i would browse codeberg:p

It's because for every dev who asks too soon there's another dev somewhere that doesn't ask at all, bills 300 hours their first month without being asked to, delivers nothing because they refused to ask for help and couldn't figure it out either. That dev is why people hate off-shoring to India. They did not work a second month.

That’s preferable to people who don’t ask for help until everything is hopelessly fucked because they kept trying to solve their problem different git commands, none of which they understood.

From personal experience:

One part is manuals / docs being hard to use. Some seem to assume a measure familiarity with the subject, creating a certain entry barrier. They're perfectly usable as reference for people who know the gist but look up details, but for younger devs, it's disheartening to get the sense that you don't understand anything. That's a common issue with FOSS tools, in my experience, where the devs naturally prioritise developing the actual tool. Asking and getting an answer for a specific example can help get a foothold and start climbing that, but it's no guarantee.

A second part is that manuals don't always cover things you can't do (because obviously it's hard to predict what people would come up with wanting to do), but it's hard to tell whether that's just incomplete unless you ask and get an explicit, hard "nope". Bonus points for commercial products documenting what you can do, but not with your current license: You'll diligently read the page for what you want to do, attempt to implement it, then be hit with "please upgrade to Premium for this feature".

A third part is terminology. Just like the non-features, it's impossible to predict all the ways someone might describe what they want to do if they don't know any better way to phrase it. I'd count language barriers into this as well, which is an issue that a smaller, US-heavy software development world wouldn't have had to the same degree as we do today.

And finally, of course, there's convenience, which is where I think the managers have the greatest impact: The less time you have to spend learning how to RTFM or digging through the docs, the less time is "wasted" on things that aren't immediately productive. Particular non-IT-background managers may not appreciate the value of such skills, so they'd rather have you spend someone else's time taking a shortcut than invest your own.

So I think this is an issue arising naturally from several independent factors, which makes it hard to tackle effectively. Managers should plan for and encourage taking time to understand the manual, but I don't see a universal solution to the documentation quality and language barriers.

Also, retiring to have a farm is a mood.