Mastodawn

Why is stack overflow so horrible?

Why is stack overflow so horrible? - Lemmy.World

Especially in my early days venturing into Python (with which I am still only casually acquainted), I’d google a problem and end up on an SO question outlining my exact problem, only see “closed as duplicate” or a bunch of snarky comments about how the questioner didn’t RTFM or whatever. Why do they hate people asking questions on this site specifically about asking questions? Part of being a noob is not just about not knowing the bare facts of a thing, but not knowing where to look for answers or even what to ask. While I’m on this soapbox, I hate it when people say “just google it.” because most of the time I see that phrase it’s because that forum post is the first google result.

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Boomer Humor Doomergod

The folks who say “just google it” are often unaware of how their own experience allows them to determine good instructions from bad.

For instance, if I told you to flummox the bumdarten by fluxing the foogartner, how would you begin learning what any of those words mean? How will you know if the bumdarten docs you’ve found are even the current version?

But at some point we have all encountered someone who simply asks for help instead of figuring out how to do it. And those people are usually in management.

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fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 1d ago

Anyone who unironically says just google it, and doesn’t google it themselves and provides a link to a concise answer should be shot on sight.

Same for the RTFM crowd. So many manuals are filled with so much fluff that just gets in the way of actually being useful.

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Boomer Humor Doomergod 1d ago

Yeah. If you’re gonna be all high and mighty at least prove you’ve read it by citing chapter and verse to help the noob.

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Tywèle 1d ago

And sometimes it impossible to google something if you don’t know the correct keywords to find what you are looking for.

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early_riser 1d ago

Yes. I tell people that IT isn’t about knowing the answer right away, it’s about knowing which questions to ask, where to ask those questions, and how to interpret the results. These skills are in no way obvious if you aren’t familiar with the system you’re working with.

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MerryJaneDoe 1d ago

Another thing about seasoned professionals - they have top-down and bottom-up knowledge of how their product works. They can discard a lot of superfluous information out of hand, which allows them to narrow the scope very quickly.

So when a newb is parsing an error log, they look at any and all related errors. 90% of their mental capacity is being used to judge each entry, asking themselves “Is this thing relevant to the problem?” Chasing red herrings.

Meanwhile, the senior engineer can glance over and see the 100 lines of network errors are just an uncaught exception from a deprecated module because a line of code never got commented out. Or some such shit.

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Jimmycrackcrack 1d ago

I recently came across a horrible piece of software called Silverfast which now doesn’t have a manual anymore. They still have their manuals up to some windows xp version which may or may not still be how certain parts of its operation are done, impossible to know. In lieu of a manual they’ve posted some videos on YouTube, some on Vimeo, different narrators each time, some terrible quality, some just fine, some of them seem from the screen recording to be a couple of versions old, some are more recent. They’re covering single topics so that it SORTA functions like a replacement for the manual in that you can search for topics like one would in a manual and hopefully find a video but it doesn’t function like a manual does since it’s obviously not static and not a proper reference and you’ve got to imprecisely try to seek around to get back to bits where the info you needed was. To add insult to injury, of you search the website for the manual, they have a document referred to as the user manual so you think you’ve finally found it, but it turns out it’s a quick start installer guide which would annoy me at the best of times because normally I’d say the steps are so basic that this document need not exist because it would be impossible to have the level of competence necessary to operate the software without also possessing the necessary competence for basic install but, but astonishingly those instructions are WRONG!

The frustrating thing is that the videos broken up by topic aren’t a bad idea at all, IN ADDITION to a real manual but as a replacement!? I was so pissed.