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People just straight-up don’t want to learn. There are always exceptions, of course, but IME the majority of people in tech are incurious. They want to do their

People just straight-up don’t want to learn. There are always exceptions, of course, but IME the majority of people in tech are incurious. They want to do their job, and get paid. Reading man pages is sadly not in that list.

jrockway 2y ago
This has always made me sad, but I think you're right in a lot of cases. What I've always tried to do is to focus on basic productivity; make sure everyone has everything they need to do their work, and that most people do it in the same way, so you can make progress on the learning journey together. Whenever people ask me for help and want to set up a meeting (not just "please answer this on Slack and I'll leave you alone"), I record the meeting, try to touch on all the related areas of their problem, and then review the recording for things that would be interesting to write about it. If any of the digressions are interesting, I go into Notion, create a new page, and write up a couple paragraphs. Then I give my team "ever wonder what dynamic linking is and how to debug it?" and they can read it and know as much as I know. I really, really struggle to deal with the fact that people don't know as much as I do (I wrote my first program when I was 4 and I'm 39 now), but I have accepted that it's not a weakness on their part, it's a weakness on my part. I wouldn't lower my standards (as a manager once suggested), but I do feel like it's my obligation to lead them on a journey of learning. That is to say, people don't learn without teaching, so be a teacher.
dilyevsky 2y ago
> They want to do their job, and get paid Where "job" is defined in a narrowest way possible to assume minimum responsibility. Still want to get 200k+ salaries though... This may sound extreme (it really isn't) but as Dr of Eng TP's job was to sus those folks out as early as possible and part ways (the kind where they go work for someone else). Some folks are completely irrational about their setups and no amount of appeasement in the form of "whys" and training is usually sufficient.
chipdart 2y ago
> People just straight-up don’t want to learn. (...) but IME the majority of people in tech are incurious. They want to do their job, and get paid. Reading man pages is sadly not in that list. I don't think you know what you're talking about. Just because you know people who do not want to waste their time on a set of unproductive chores you arbitrarily singled out, that does not mean they are against learning. Your take is particularly absurd considering the topic: engineers working on distributed services. Do you actually believe that you build up enough knowledge on this topic to become a professional in the field if you "straight-up don't want to learn"? There is not a single developer in the field who, at least to some degree, is not self-taught. > They want to do their job, and get paid. Everyone wants to get paid. Do you know anyone who works non-profit? What you're failing to understand is the "do their job" part. Software developers are trained to solve the problems they face, and not waste time with the problems they do not have. Time is precious, and they invest it where it has the largest return on investment. > Reading man pages is sadly not in that list. Man pages are notoriously a colossal waste of time. In general they are poorly thought out, they are incomplete, they were written with complete disregard for user experience, and more often than not they are way out of date. Why do you think sites like Stack overflow is so popular? Because all those "incurious" people in tech feels the need to ask questions and dig through answers on how to solve problems? I think you're just picking a very personal definition of competence which conveniently boils down to "do the things I do, and do not do the things I don't". Except the bulk of the people in the field is smart, and some have already solved problems that you aren't aware exist, such as wasting precious time deciphering unreadable documents that are systematically out of date.
- pxc 2y ago
  > Man pages are notoriously a colossal waste of time. In general they are poorly thought out, they are incomplete, they were written with complete disregard for user experience, and more often than not they are way out of date. Uh, what? What man pages are you reading? I read manpages all the time, and I've never run into an issue where one contained info that was untrue because outdated. The only manpages I've ever read that I'd characterize as incomplete are Apple's.¹ > Why do you think sites like Stack overflow is so popular? Because all those "incurious" people in tech feels the need to ask questions and dig through answers on how to solve problems? One of the reasons Stack Overflow is so popular is that people who can't/won't read docs can use it to have answers spoonfed to them, often by people who only differ from them in being more willing/able to read the docs. Isn't that extremely obvious? > unreadable documents Reading isn't a singular skill— each genre requires its own skills, and you gradually pick those up by reading in that genre. Reading novels doesn't much prepare you to read math textbooks, but that doesn't make all math textbooks 'unreadable'. The same things goes for skimming. Skimming a text is likewise a (set of) genre-specific skill(s), built up through practice. Frankly, moving from your terminal to your web browser to look up how to use a CLI tool is only consistently faster than working with the docs native to that CLI environment (man pages, info pages, usage messages, --help flags, help subcommands, tldr pages, etc.) if you have don't have very good reading skills in the genres of those native docs. As someone who does not have difficulty skimming or navigating manpages quickly, when someone tells me that digging through StackOverflow seems like less of a waste of time than reading docs and so they never read docs, I have to wonder if the real issue is that a reading skills deficit is caught in a self-reinforcing loop. And indeed, a trip to StackOverflow never ends at StackOverflow for a person with much curiosity. Because even if a curious person finds a solution to their immediate problem, they will wonder things like: - is this solution outmoded by some other fix? - how is the feature/option/change used in this solution actually supposed to work? - are there any alternatives I should know about? - if I wanted to do things slightly differently, could I still use the method/feature/option referenced in this solution? does it have any parameters that are easy to swap or tweak? - is this scenario what the feature/method/option in the solution is actually intended for? should I care? ... and the quickest way to answer questions like that is usually a glance at a manual. ----- 1: In some cases with GNU stuff the literal `man` pages are abridged versions of the `info` pages. But even then, the `man` pages direct you to `info` pages. It's not like they leave you having.

jrockway 2y ago

This has always made me sad, but I think you're right in a lot of cases. What I've always tried to do is to focus on basic productivity; make sure everyone has everything they need to do their work, and that most people do it in the same way, so you can make progress on the learning journey together. Whenever people ask me for help and want to set up a meeting (not just "please answer this on Slack and I'll leave you alone"), I record the meeting, try to touch on all the related areas of their problem, and then review the recording for things that would be interesting to write about it. If any of the digressions are interesting, I go into Notion, create a new page, and write up a couple paragraphs. Then I give my team "ever wonder what dynamic linking is and how to debug it?" and they can read it and know as much as I know. I really, really struggle to deal with the fact that people don't know as much as I do (I wrote my first program when I was 4 and I'm 39 now), but I have accepted that it's not a weakness on their part, it's a weakness on my part. I wouldn't lower my standards (as a manager once suggested), but I do feel like it's my obligation to lead them on a journey of learning. That is to say, people don't learn without teaching, so be a teacher.

dilyevsky 2y ago

> They want to do their job, and get paid Where "job" is defined in a narrowest way possible to assume minimum responsibility. Still want to get 200k+ salaries though... This may sound extreme (it really isn't) but as Dr of Eng TP's job was to sus those folks out as early as possible and part ways (the kind where they go work for someone else). Some folks are completely irrational about their setups and no amount of appeasement in the form of "whys" and training is usually sufficient.

chipdart 2y ago

> People just straight-up don’t want to learn. (...) but IME the majority of people in tech are incurious. They want to do their job, and get paid. Reading man pages is sadly not in that list. I don't think you know what you're talking about. Just because you know people who do not want to waste their time on a set of unproductive chores you arbitrarily singled out, that does not mean they are against learning. Your take is particularly absurd considering the topic: engineers working on distributed services. Do you actually believe that you build up enough knowledge on this topic to become a professional in the field if you "straight-up don't want to learn"? There is not a single developer in the field who, at least to some degree, is not self-taught. > They want to do their job, and get paid. Everyone wants to get paid. Do you know anyone who works non-profit? What you're failing to understand is the "do their job" part. Software developers are trained to solve the problems they face, and not waste time with the problems they do not have. Time is precious, and they invest it where it has the largest return on investment. > Reading man pages is sadly not in that list. Man pages are notoriously a colossal waste of time. In general they are poorly thought out, they are incomplete, they were written with complete disregard for user experience, and more often than not they are way out of date. Why do you think sites like Stack overflow is so popular? Because all those "incurious" people in tech feels the need to ask questions and dig through answers on how to solve problems? I think you're just picking a very personal definition of competence which conveniently boils down to "do the things I do, and do not do the things I don't". Except the bulk of the people in the field is smart, and some have already solved problems that you aren't aware exist, such as wasting precious time deciphering unreadable documents that are systematically out of date.

pxc 2y ago
> Man pages are notoriously a colossal waste of time. In general they are poorly thought out, they are incomplete, they were written with complete disregard for user experience, and more often than not they are way out of date. Uh, what? What man pages are you reading? I read manpages all the time, and I've never run into an issue where one contained info that was untrue because outdated. The only manpages I've ever read that I'd characterize as incomplete are Apple's.¹ > Why do you think sites like Stack overflow is so popular? Because all those "incurious" people in tech feels the need to ask questions and dig through answers on how to solve problems? One of the reasons Stack Overflow is so popular is that people who can't/won't read docs can use it to have answers spoonfed to them, often by people who only differ from them in being more willing/able to read the docs. Isn't that extremely obvious? > unreadable documents Reading isn't a singular skill— each genre requires its own skills, and you gradually pick those up by reading in that genre. Reading novels doesn't much prepare you to read math textbooks, but that doesn't make all math textbooks 'unreadable'. The same things goes for skimming. Skimming a text is likewise a (set of) genre-specific skill(s), built up through practice. Frankly, moving from your terminal to your web browser to look up how to use a CLI tool is only consistently faster than working with the docs native to that CLI environment (man pages, info pages, usage messages, --help flags, help subcommands, tldr pages, etc.) if you have don't have very good reading skills in the genres of those native docs. As someone who does not have difficulty skimming or navigating manpages quickly, when someone tells me that digging through StackOverflow seems like less of a waste of time than reading docs and so they never read docs, I have to wonder if the real issue is that a reading skills deficit is caught in a self-reinforcing loop. And indeed, a trip to StackOverflow never ends at StackOverflow for a person with much curiosity. Because even if a curious person finds a solution to their immediate problem, they will wonder things like: - is this solution outmoded by some other fix? - how is the feature/option/change used in this solution actually supposed to work? - are there any alternatives I should know about? - if I wanted to do things slightly differently, could I still use the method/feature/option referenced in this solution? does it have any parameters that are easy to swap or tweak? - is this scenario what the feature/method/option in the solution is actually intended for? should I care? ... and the quickest way to answer questions like that is usually a glance at a manual. ----- 1: In some cases with GNU stuff the literal `man` pages are abridged versions of the `info` pages. But even then, the `man` pages direct you to `info` pages. It's not like they leave you having.