12 ms·

True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you". Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do

True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you". Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them. I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible but then again, if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first. EDIT: By laziness I mean that there are known places (they know of) with documentation that cover what they need but they don't go there first and not something I have some deep domain knowledge of that would take them a long time to find or figure out. I would personally still not reply with an AI answer but I am tempted sometimes...

chongli 4mo ago
Is it laziness? Or is it frustration from answering the same basic beginner questions over and over again? It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. Then you can explain why your attempt to Google for the answer failed. Of course that may be breaking down, as search engine results quality has declined dramatically in recent years.
- sdoering 4mo ago
  > It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.
  - sameesh 4mo ago
    In my line of work, its certain peoples' jobs to know certain things. If I need a piece of information that somebody else is responsible for understanding, I'm just going to ask directly for what I need instead of trying to research it myself. To research it myself would mean attempting to do somebody else's job, which is just unhelpful for everyone.
    - j_w 4mo ago
      There is a line between "somebodies job to know" and you just being too lazy to look at the documentation/do basic research.
  - layer8 4mo ago
    That experience is better characterized as unprofessional, then. ;)
- jvanderbot 4mo ago
  It may not be laziness, but it is definitely entirely lacking in empathy. Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction? There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.
  - ako 4mo ago
    I’m using ai to answer questions, but I instruct it in draft what answers to include, what info to include from my llm wiki (second brain). Saves time to write a correct response, can easily refer to past conversations, but definitely not 100% outsources to AI.
    - jvanderbot 4mo ago
      If you need to find information to answer a colleague, use AI if that's helpful. I have no idea why anyone would let an AI dictate the response - you lose your entire voice and depersonalize your response. Do you keep a markdown of your communication style and past inside jokes? Or did you start so early with AI that you dont even have those to keep?
      - ako 4mo ago
        Because it’s often hard to find the right voice? because it’s often hard to describe something in the correct way? Communication is hard, finding the correct tone of voice often takes me a long time, so using AI makes me more efficient in a busy day?
        jvanderbot 4mo ago
        That "hardness" is what brings value to the interaction, in almost every sense of value except "speed", and with AI, speed is suspect because of the investment imbalance - it's too easy to prompt for a response then fire that response and expect the reader to do the hard work. I notice you didn't use an AI to debate this, just as I didn't use an AI to refute it. Does this make the interaction more or less meaningful for you? That you cared enough to actually read and reply, and I did, too? I didn't have too reply, nor did you, but we felt the need to exchange ideas together, not spawn agents to fight.
- singpolyma3 4mo ago
  The examples in the article are questions the AI did not know the answer to though. So hardly "basic beginner"
sdoering 4mo ago
> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them. Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate. If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice. > I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate. Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop. Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".
- strken 4mo ago
  Can you not say "sorry but I think you should try Claude first" and send the slop next? If someone treated me like that I'd either look for a new job, walk to their desk and do conflict management, or try to work out how I'd offended them. Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.
js8 4mo ago
LMGTFY is an ironic jab, not a suggestion. > if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI. But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
- irishcoffee 4mo ago
  If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood. If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.
  - js8 4mo ago
    That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise. "I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
- randallsquared 4mo ago
  > You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.
  - geerlingguy 4mo ago
    Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself". They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
21asdffdsa12 4mo ago
Laziness and "Memetic Imprinting" of the inevitability where the ultimate attack vectors. Robot experience this tragic irony for me
Forgeties79 4mo ago
If you tell somebody to go google it, you are being incredibly rude 95% of the time. That is pretty widely understood
- hvb2 4mo ago
  Sure, but asking someone something that should be easily answered in a few seconds is also rude. Programming is an intense job, in that it takes a lot of focus and time to build up a mental model of what you're working on to make progress
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    I highly doubt you never ask questions that you could’ve looked up yourself. “Go Google it” translates to “this isn’t worth my time,” which is a pretty rude way to be.
    - bigfishrunning 4mo ago
      But sometimes it isn't worth my time. If I'm being asked something about what I'm working on, fair enough. If I'm being asked what a command-line switch for curl does (and that's not related to what I'm doing) the total cost is less to look at the docs, rather then asking me to look at the docs. Not weighing my time and effort into the equation is rude on behalf of the asker.
      - Forgeties79 4mo ago
        Nobody said you must answer any and all questions sent your way or that everyone is allowed to dismiss the value of your time. We’re veering away from the original discussion here.
    - hvb2 4mo ago
      What I'm trying to say is that the cost of answering the question might look like 30 seconds to the person asking. What really happened is, you context switch, answer a mundane question, and now spend 30 minutes to get back to the mental state that you were in that made you productive
singpolyma3 4mo ago
Let me Google that for you implies the answer is well known and trivial to find. An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
bombcar 4mo ago
90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.
- onemoresoop 4mo ago
  Maybe they don’t wanna take responsibility for that answer?
  - mrweasel 4mo ago
    In our case we're completely allowed to use AI, but if you do, you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously). So if your LLM says "Sure, go ahead and run that code" and it deletes the production database, that's your fault, just as much as if you reviewed it manually and said the same thing.
    - bigfishrunning 4mo ago
      > you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously) why not in a legal sense? If someone asks me what cleaning supplies are safe to mix, and i just ask some chatbot, don't vet the output, copy the response, and they end up poisoning themselves, am I not responsible? If I'm a lawyer, and pass unvetted AI legal advice to my client, and they go to jail, should i keep my license?
      - mrweasel 4mo ago
        Typically if you develop a software product for a company, the company resumes responsibility. No one would develop anything for any high risk business, if they were to assume personal responsibility of the end result. LLMs don't really chance that, and any serious bug would be an error of process. Developers are perfectly capable of creating dangerous or expensive mistakes even without LLMs. If we accept that LLMs are just tools, the developer should be no more responsible that if they choose to use Visual Studio over Vim and Visual Studio refactors something wrong. Theres's then the question of gross incompetence, and were the developer could be fired or perhaps even sued by their employer, the same as if they hadn't used an LLM. However the case I had in mind was in regards to the legality of the way the AI models acquire and reproduce code. We're not held personally responsible for any license violation created by the tool.
vidarh 4mo ago
The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good. The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result... With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.
everdrive 4mo ago
I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me." The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
- Hobadee 4mo ago
  If you are really concerned with that, you should take a first stab at it, then ask AI to proofread it for you and change the tone if necessary. I have no problem with that; thinking was still done by a human, you just needed help proofreading, which has always been something that's valid to outsource.
contravariant 4mo ago
If you feel the need to hide how you got the answer then you know something is wrong.
jvanderbot 4mo ago
Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement. He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew). It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person. Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
- Falell 4mo ago
  The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    I’ve encountered this regularly. I love to learn. I never want to stop learning. Apparently, I’m in a minority. I have often offered to work with folks, and teach them how to develop shipping software. This is something I’m actually fairly good at, having done it, my entire career. I’m retired, now, but continue to develop shipping software. I often offer to do so, with others, so they can learn in an actual production context. Valuable stuff. They could actually learn skills that could boost their own careers into LEO. Instead, they invariably ask me to do it for them, or, more annoyingly, say they’ll do it, then never show up, and castigate me for going ahead without them.
    - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
      Meta: This is why HN attracts curious people. They are rare. Finding and hiring them is hard. The forum cultivates for them, like gardeners tending a garden for pollinators. My best tip for hiring has always been "Hire curious people with a proven ability to build, get out of their way, and retain them as long as you can by meeting their professional expectations (comp, work experience, meaningful work, broadly speaking)." Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments) (strongly agree working with people who do not care or do not want to learn is soul crushing, engineer around it to the best of your ability, or change your operating environment to improve upon it, when able to; your time and energy is non renewable)
bronco21016 4mo ago
I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding. Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging. It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
- butlike 4mo ago
  Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
butlike 4mo ago
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wisty 4mo ago
No one here wants to say it, so I will. A lot of people are relatively stupid. If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively. Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower. If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter? It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
- intrikate 4mo ago
  I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. If you don't understand, you aren't smart enough to and shouldn't try? If you learn slow, just stop because you're... slower? What are you talking about?
  - wisty 4mo ago
    Kind of. Everyone needs to draw a line. Call it an "explore vs exploit" problem, if you want. Sure, you want to fail a bit so you know where the line is, or to push it forwards a bit. But there is, at least in principal, always a line. I'm just saying that if someone draws the line in a place that you think is waaaay too soon, maybe they aren't entirely wrong.
    - intrikate 4mo ago
      Ah, okay, that makes your original comment make more sense. Thank you for the clarification.
andai 4mo ago
So I think it's a cultural thing. I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time. On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy. I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful. For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
morpheuskafka 4mo ago
> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you". Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired. The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention). You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
- hatradiowigwam 4mo ago
  People actively do that at work. My employer is a large [US] government financial entity, that likely holds your mortgage and the mortgage of people you know. Our profit this last quarter was publicly reported as 3.6 billion dollars. Most people will respond to any question with an OpenAI-generated answer, and you'll notice it most when 3 or 4 people in a teams chat all reply with a near-identical answer to a question you ask in the channel. I can't overstate how much AI is used here, or how zealous the leadership is in pushing us to use it for...everything. Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.
eddd-ddde 4mo ago
The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is: "I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?" This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input. It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
ilikecakeandpie 4mo ago
IMO, its a little jab/playful when a friend sends a LMGTFY link and its really disrespectful if a colleuage sends it
- pessimizer 4mo ago
  I already feel disrespected if a colleague makes me feel like sending it. If a friend tells me to get him a beer from the fridge because they're too lazy to get up, 7/10 times I'm going to do it. They're not going to be insulted when I don't because they know that they don't deserve anything, and they'll probably more often than not get up if I asked them the same thing. If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up. edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.
ertgbnm 4mo ago
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TheGRS 4mo ago
I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.
- conductr 4mo ago
  The bigger issue I feel is knowing the medium for the question/help you need. If you need their experience and knowledge then talk to them. Email as a medium is already a wrong choice most of the time in these situations. Expecting them to give you the context that helps you grow from their experience in an email is placing a huge burden on them.

chongli 4mo ago

Is it laziness? Or is it frustration from answering the same basic beginner questions over and over again? It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. Then you can explain why your attempt to Google for the answer failed. Of course that may be breaking down, as search engine results quality has declined dramatically in recent years.

sdoering 4mo ago
> It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.
- sameesh 4mo ago
  In my line of work, its certain peoples' jobs to know certain things. If I need a piece of information that somebody else is responsible for understanding, I'm just going to ask directly for what I need instead of trying to research it myself. To research it myself would mean attempting to do somebody else's job, which is just unhelpful for everyone.
  - j_w 4mo ago
    There is a line between "somebodies job to know" and you just being too lazy to look at the documentation/do basic research.
- layer8 4mo ago
  That experience is better characterized as unprofessional, then. ;)
jvanderbot 4mo ago
It may not be laziness, but it is definitely entirely lacking in empathy. Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction? There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.
- ako 4mo ago
  I’m using ai to answer questions, but I instruct it in draft what answers to include, what info to include from my llm wiki (second brain). Saves time to write a correct response, can easily refer to past conversations, but definitely not 100% outsources to AI.
  - jvanderbot 4mo ago
    If you need to find information to answer a colleague, use AI if that's helpful. I have no idea why anyone would let an AI dictate the response - you lose your entire voice and depersonalize your response. Do you keep a markdown of your communication style and past inside jokes? Or did you start so early with AI that you dont even have those to keep?
    - ako 4mo ago
      Because it’s often hard to find the right voice? because it’s often hard to describe something in the correct way? Communication is hard, finding the correct tone of voice often takes me a long time, so using AI makes me more efficient in a busy day?
      - jvanderbot 4mo ago
        That "hardness" is what brings value to the interaction, in almost every sense of value except "speed", and with AI, speed is suspect because of the investment imbalance - it's too easy to prompt for a response then fire that response and expect the reader to do the hard work. I notice you didn't use an AI to debate this, just as I didn't use an AI to refute it. Does this make the interaction more or less meaningful for you? That you cared enough to actually read and reply, and I did, too? I didn't have too reply, nor did you, but we felt the need to exchange ideas together, not spawn agents to fight.
singpolyma3 4mo ago
The examples in the article are questions the AI did not know the answer to though. So hardly "basic beginner"

sdoering 4mo ago

> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them. Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate. If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice. > I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.

embedding-shape 4mo ago
> And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate. Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop. Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".
strken 4mo ago
Can you not say "sorry but I think you should try Claude first" and send the slop next? If someone treated me like that I'd either look for a new job, walk to their desk and do conflict management, or try to work out how I'd offended them. Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.

js8 4mo ago

LMGTFY is an ironic jab, not a suggestion. > if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI. But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)

irishcoffee 4mo ago
If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood. If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.
- js8 4mo ago
  That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise. "I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
randallsquared 4mo ago
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.
- geerlingguy 4mo ago
  Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself". They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.

21asdffdsa12 4mo ago

Laziness and "Memetic Imprinting" of the inevitability where the ultimate attack vectors. Robot experience this tragic irony for me

Forgeties79 4mo ago

If you tell somebody to go google it, you are being incredibly rude 95% of the time. That is pretty widely understood

hvb2 4mo ago
Sure, but asking someone something that should be easily answered in a few seconds is also rude. Programming is an intense job, in that it takes a lot of focus and time to build up a mental model of what you're working on to make progress
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  I highly doubt you never ask questions that you could’ve looked up yourself. “Go Google it” translates to “this isn’t worth my time,” which is a pretty rude way to be.
  - bigfishrunning 4mo ago
    But sometimes it isn't worth my time. If I'm being asked something about what I'm working on, fair enough. If I'm being asked what a command-line switch for curl does (and that's not related to what I'm doing) the total cost is less to look at the docs, rather then asking me to look at the docs. Not weighing my time and effort into the equation is rude on behalf of the asker.
    - Forgeties79 4mo ago
      Nobody said you must answer any and all questions sent your way or that everyone is allowed to dismiss the value of your time. We’re veering away from the original discussion here.
  - hvb2 4mo ago
    What I'm trying to say is that the cost of answering the question might look like 30 seconds to the person asking. What really happened is, you context switch, answer a mundane question, and now spend 30 minutes to get back to the mental state that you were in that made you productive

singpolyma3 4mo ago

Let me Google that for you implies the answer is well known and trivial to find. An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that

bombcar 4mo ago

90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.

onemoresoop 4mo ago
Maybe they don’t wanna take responsibility for that answer?
- mrweasel 4mo ago
  In our case we're completely allowed to use AI, but if you do, you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously). So if your LLM says "Sure, go ahead and run that code" and it deletes the production database, that's your fault, just as much as if you reviewed it manually and said the same thing.
  - bigfishrunning 4mo ago
    > you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously) why not in a legal sense? If someone asks me what cleaning supplies are safe to mix, and i just ask some chatbot, don't vet the output, copy the response, and they end up poisoning themselves, am I not responsible? If I'm a lawyer, and pass unvetted AI legal advice to my client, and they go to jail, should i keep my license?
    - mrweasel 4mo ago
      Typically if you develop a software product for a company, the company resumes responsibility. No one would develop anything for any high risk business, if they were to assume personal responsibility of the end result. LLMs don't really chance that, and any serious bug would be an error of process. Developers are perfectly capable of creating dangerous or expensive mistakes even without LLMs. If we accept that LLMs are just tools, the developer should be no more responsible that if they choose to use Visual Studio over Vim and Visual Studio refactors something wrong. Theres's then the question of gross incompetence, and were the developer could be fired or perhaps even sued by their employer, the same as if they hadn't used an LLM. However the case I had in mind was in regards to the legality of the way the AI models acquire and reproduce code. We're not held personally responsible for any license violation created by the tool.

vidarh 4mo ago

The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good. The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result... With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.

everdrive 4mo ago

I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me." The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.

Hobadee 4mo ago
If you are really concerned with that, you should take a first stab at it, then ask AI to proofread it for you and change the tone if necessary. I have no problem with that; thinking was still done by a human, you just needed help proofreading, which has always been something that's valid to outsource.

contravariant 4mo ago

If you feel the need to hide how you got the answer then you know something is wrong.

jvanderbot 4mo ago

Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement. He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew). It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person. Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.

Falell 4mo ago
The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  I’ve encountered this regularly. I love to learn. I never want to stop learning. Apparently, I’m in a minority. I have often offered to work with folks, and teach them how to develop shipping software. This is something I’m actually fairly good at, having done it, my entire career. I’m retired, now, but continue to develop shipping software. I often offer to do so, with others, so they can learn in an actual production context. Valuable stuff. They could actually learn skills that could boost their own careers into LEO. Instead, they invariably ask me to do it for them, or, more annoyingly, say they’ll do it, then never show up, and castigate me for going ahead without them.
  - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
    Meta: This is why HN attracts curious people. They are rare. Finding and hiring them is hard. The forum cultivates for them, like gardeners tending a garden for pollinators. My best tip for hiring has always been "Hire curious people with a proven ability to build, get out of their way, and retain them as long as you can by meeting their professional expectations (comp, work experience, meaningful work, broadly speaking)." Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments) (strongly agree working with people who do not care or do not want to learn is soul crushing, engineer around it to the best of your ability, or change your operating environment to improve upon it, when able to; your time and energy is non renewable)

bronco21016 4mo ago

I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding. Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging. It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.

butlike 4mo ago
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

butlike 4mo ago

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wisty 4mo ago

No one here wants to say it, so I will. A lot of people are relatively stupid. If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively. Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower. If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter? It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.

intrikate 4mo ago
I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. If you don't understand, you aren't smart enough to and shouldn't try? If you learn slow, just stop because you're... slower? What are you talking about?
- wisty 4mo ago
  Kind of. Everyone needs to draw a line. Call it an "explore vs exploit" problem, if you want. Sure, you want to fail a bit so you know where the line is, or to push it forwards a bit. But there is, at least in principal, always a line. I'm just saying that if someone draws the line in a place that you think is waaaay too soon, maybe they aren't entirely wrong.
  - intrikate 4mo ago
    Ah, okay, that makes your original comment make more sense. Thank you for the clarification.

andai 4mo ago

So I think it's a cultural thing. I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time. On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy. I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful. For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.

morpheuskafka 4mo ago

> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you". Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired. The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention). You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.

hatradiowigwam 4mo ago
People actively do that at work. My employer is a large [US] government financial entity, that likely holds your mortgage and the mortgage of people you know. Our profit this last quarter was publicly reported as 3.6 billion dollars. Most people will respond to any question with an OpenAI-generated answer, and you'll notice it most when 3 or 4 people in a teams chat all reply with a near-identical answer to a question you ask in the channel. I can't overstate how much AI is used here, or how zealous the leadership is in pushing us to use it for...everything. Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.

eddd-ddde 4mo ago

The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is: "I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?" This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input. It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.

ilikecakeandpie 4mo ago

IMO, its a little jab/playful when a friend sends a LMGTFY link and its really disrespectful if a colleuage sends it

pessimizer 4mo ago
I already feel disrespected if a colleague makes me feel like sending it. If a friend tells me to get him a beer from the fridge because they're too lazy to get up, 7/10 times I'm going to do it. They're not going to be insulted when I don't because they know that they don't deserve anything, and they'll probably more often than not get up if I asked them the same thing. If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up. edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.

ertgbnm 4mo ago

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TheGRS 4mo ago

I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.

conductr 4mo ago
The bigger issue I feel is knowing the medium for the question/help you need. If you need their experience and knowledge then talk to them. Email as a medium is already a wrong choice most of the time in these situations. Expecting them to give you the context that helps you grow from their experience in an email is placing a huge burden on them.