Re:Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
by lordCarbonFiber on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @01:26PM
(#11074764)
Continuing on your point, one thing I've found with talking with less tech oriented people is that Googling is very much a developed skill. If you don't have the foundation of knowledge to understand what question you're actually asking it becomes very hard to RTFM even if the earnest desire is there.
In my experience, when a more junior co-worker has a question outside my immediate expertise, I find my self searching for what they ~meant~ not what they are actually asking.
I think a lot of disconnect in the community comes from this acquired auto parsing.
Re:Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
by slavik81 on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @03:19PM
(#11075658)
Nothing's more frustrating than Googling a problem and finding that the first result is a post from someone with the exact same problem as you, with the only response being "Google it yourself".
"Python strings have a method, rstrip, for that. You can read about it here: https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html#string-met.... I find Googling 'python docs x', where x is what you're looking for is a quick way to see if Python has that thing included in the standard library."
And this is bad:
"It's in the docs, google for it."
And even worse, a literal:
"RTFM."
I understand the author to mean that if you want to say the last two things, don't bother.