Saturday, September 5, 2009
The RTFM Mentality
Recently I was searching for the answer to an issue I was having. Google sent me to forum after forum, and they were full of people asking for help. Overwhelmingly I saw responses that boiled down to RTFM. Now I do agree that generally that's the answer, but if the person is asking for help at least point them in the right direction. RTFM... man blah and pay attention to section XYZ is a much better answer. If somebody is drowning, don't tell them to learn to swim. Throw them a rope and while you're pulling them in tell them they should learn to swim.
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Learn to fish rather than looking for somone to give you a fish
ReplyDeletePointing someone at the right man page or whatever isn't the same as giving them a fish, it's like showing them the sweet spot in the lake where the fish always bite.
ReplyDeleteI quickly learned the art of avoiding RTFM answers: RTFM!! If you have done your due diligence, your question should reflect that fact.
ReplyDelete"How do you install foo on Ubuntu" is an example of an RTFM question. We know practically nothing of the user's setup, his knowledgability, his background... We don't know if we need to give him a 1-line instruction, or detailed, step-by-step handholding. After the user RTFM's, the same question will look like this:
"I'm trying to install Foo on Ubuntu. I've followed the foo howto at www.example.com/foo-howto, but I'm getting error "bar" at step 4. I've tried baz and bat, to no avail. I'm including the qux log. What am I doing wrong?"
The answer to this question is probably going to be something useful.