3 ms·

I have managed to get a lot of notoriety in my company by just: 1. Paying attention to error messages 2. Reading documentation 3. Looking up stuff I don't fu

I have managed to get a lot of notoriety in my company by just: 1. Paying attention to error messages 2. Reading documentation 3. Looking up stuff I don't fully understand(including googling error messages) That's it. Some people don't even read error messages at all. I understand non technical people doing that, but I've seen far too many engineers doing it. If anything doesn't go exactly as expected, they freeze. I have no idea how a person gets so far in their careers without reading error messages. Actually, I do, those people ask others to figure out stuff for them. That's way prevalent in enterprise settings. Sure, collaboration is good, but I've seen a lot of instances where there's a massive imbalance – you'll have 10 people pinging a single person to 'unblock' them. They could have spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out yourself. I'll move mountains to help someone that comes to me after having done some basic homework to try to fix (or at least triage) an issue. It very rare though. It's also amazing how many people will just go ahead without having read a single line of documentation of the thing they are working on. I've even had a developer dive in a Golang codebase without having _ever_ worked on the language. That would have been fine – that's how I learn new languages, just get accustomed, before doing some more formal training and exercises – except that he continued to not read the language documentation before asking a bunch of questions. Needless to say, the questions weren't good. And number 3... just rubber ducky everything. If you can't explain it, you don't get it. Go read up on the topic. Sometimes I'll find out that I don't fully understand something as I'm writing an email to others.

vladvasiliu 4y ago
> I'll move mountains to help someone that comes to me after having done some basic homework to try to fix (or at least triage) an issue. It very rare though. This. I actually am OK with people not figuring out even basic stuff. But please, at least try to give the impression that you've put some effort in, instead of just trying to have me do your homework while you browse facebook or whatever.
tetha 4y ago
> I'll move mountains to help someone that comes to me after having done some basic homework to try to fix (or at least triage) an issue. It very rare though. These are rare, but they also tend to be the really effective ones. We have a couple of teams who understand the stack, read documentation and read error messages. We generally don't hear of them for months and months, because they are too busy being productive. But when we hear of them, it's usually time to push boundaries of the infrastructure and the processes. They tried everything and nothing worked and now it's time to make it work.
dan_mctree 4y ago
> except that he continued to not read the language documentation before asking a bunch of questions Can't really blame people for that too much, most language documentation is utterly unreadable unless you already know exactly what you're doing. And even if you do get it, it's in one eye and out the other. Most people just don't learn very well from reading technical information you don't need to use right away. You might be a happy exception and got to build up your notoriety that way
- samus 4y ago
  This doesn't hold for any popular language. For those, a bazillion tutorials in various formats, books and example projects have been written. Language documentation is for looking up nitty-gritty details. You go there if you already know what you're looking for. It works for some languages and for some people, but reading it from top to bottom is usually a horrible way to learn a programming language.

vladvasiliu 4y ago

> I'll move mountains to help someone that comes to me after having done some basic homework to try to fix (or at least triage) an issue. It very rare though. This. I actually am OK with people not figuring out even basic stuff. But please, at least try to give the impression that you've put some effort in, instead of just trying to have me do your homework while you browse facebook or whatever.

tetha 4y ago

> I'll move mountains to help someone that comes to me after having done some basic homework to try to fix (or at least triage) an issue. It very rare though. These are rare, but they also tend to be the really effective ones. We have a couple of teams who understand the stack, read documentation and read error messages. We generally don't hear of them for months and months, because they are too busy being productive. But when we hear of them, it's usually time to push boundaries of the infrastructure and the processes. They tried everything and nothing worked and now it's time to make it work.

dan_mctree 4y ago

> except that he continued to not read the language documentation before asking a bunch of questions Can't really blame people for that too much, most language documentation is utterly unreadable unless you already know exactly what you're doing. And even if you do get it, it's in one eye and out the other. Most people just don't learn very well from reading technical information you don't need to use right away. You might be a happy exception and got to build up your notoriety that way

samus 4y ago
This doesn't hold for any popular language. For those, a bazillion tutorials in various formats, books and example projects have been written. Language documentation is for looking up nitty-gritty details. You go there if you already know what you're looking for. It works for some languages and for some people, but reading it from top to bottom is usually a horrible way to learn a programming language.