> 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are incomplete, they were written with complete disregard for user experience, and more often than not they are way out of date.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that you aren't aware exist, such as wasting precious time deciphering unreadable documents that are systematically out of date.
> Do you actually believe that you build up enough knowledge on [distributed services] to become a professional in the field if you "straight-up don't want to learn"?
Given the modern hiring practice of "can you pass Leetcode," and "can you memorize and regurgitate how to architect a link shortener," yes, yes I do. There is a vast difference between learning to pass a test, and learning because you're sincerely interested in the topic.
> Everyone wants to get paid. Do you know anyone who works non-profit?
Of course we all want to get paid. The intent of the sentence, as I think you know, was that many lack intrinsic motivation, of learning for the sake of learning.
> 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.
I think what you're failing to understand is that there is a difference between a factory worker and a craftsman. There is absolutely nothing wrong with factory work, to be clear here – I in no way intend to disparage honest work – I just personally find it a difficult personality to work alongside.
> Time is precious, and they invest it where it has the largest return on investment.
To me, this reads as "be selfish." The fastest way to get an answer is to ask someone who knows. This is not, however, the best way to retain knowledge, nor is it considerate of others' time. That's not to say you shouldn't ask for help, but it's a much different ask when you come to someone saying, "this is what I'm trying to do, this is what I've done, and this has been my result – can you help?"
I can't tell you the number of times someone has DM'd me asking for help on something I've never touched, but by reading docs, have solved. I always try to reinforce that by linking to the docs in the answer, but it hasn't proven to be a successful method of deterring future LMGTFY.
> Man pages are notoriously a colossal waste of time.
Citation needed.
> In general they are poorly thought out
Do you have some specific examples?
> They are incomplete
See above; also, if you've found this to be true, have you considered giving back by updating them?
> They were written with complete disregard for user experience
They were and are written for people who wish to understand their tools, not for people who want a 5 minute Medium post that contains the code necessary to complete a task.
> And more often than not they are way out of date.
I can't think of a time where the man pages _included with a tool_ were out of date. If your system is itself out of date, I can see where this could be true. Again, do you have some specific examples?
> 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?
SO is a great site, with a dizzying variety of quality in its questions and answers. Take one of (the?) most upvoted answers ever, on branch prediction [0]. The question itself isn't easily answerable via reading docs, and as the answer shows, is surprisingly deep. Next, a highly-upvoted question about how to reset local git commits [1]. This is a question that _is_ easily answerable by reading docs [2]. Or a question on what `__main__` is [3] in Python. A fair question (it is somewhat odd from the outside, especially if you have no experience in Python, have no idea what dunder methods are, etc.), but again, one that's easily answerable by reading docs [4].
> 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".
Of course I think that the way I do things is mostly correct; otherwise why would I be doing them?
> 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.
Strawman aside, I never said people in tech aren't smart, I said they're largely incurious. Words matter.
> Given the modern hiring practice of "can you pass Leetcode," and "can you memorize and regurgitate how to architect a link shortener," yes, yes I do.
You are contradicting yourself. If there's anything that requires studying and preparation, that's leetcode.
Also, "memorize and regurgitate how to architect a link shortener" is also known as learning and knowing the basics of systems architecture and software architecture. That's an odd way of criticising others for being more competent than you.
> Of course I think that the way I do things is mostly correct; otherwise why would I be doing them?
"My way is correct" doesn't necessarily imply "other ways are incorrect". Sometimes there's not one single solution to a problem. I love using Linux for my personal machines, but I don't think that people who don't are doing things wrong; they just have different preferences on how to do things, and that's fine.
> 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.
> And indeed, a trip to StackOverflow never ends at StackOverflow for a person with much curiosity.
My favorite variety of SO question is "how do I do X in $LANGUAGE," because inevitably, people pile in with various answers, and then someone starts benchmarking all of them and providing graphs. Occasionally someone even breaks down the assembly instructions for each solution and explains why one is superior to the other. All in all, a fanatical obsession over something small and relatively unimportant, because they like to learn, and they like to share what they've learned.
Every single man page out there leads to a user experience that is at best subpar.
> 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 (...)
Pause and look at what you're saying. Your only criticism of SO is how it improves the task of providing meaningful information to users.
The way you opt to spin improvements to user experience as "spoonfed" speaks volumes of your inability to understand the problem and the value you place on gratuitous ladder-pulling. You even contradict your remarks on man pages.
> Reading isn't a singular skill— each genre requires its own skills (...)
No. Writing is a skill. Producing content that the target audience is able to consume and brings value is a skill. The moment you, as a end-user, feel the need to hunker down and decipher arcane texts is the moment you should realize the documentation is bad.
Again, Stack overflow is widely used as ad-hoc crowd-sourced documentation for a reason. Some project maintainers even go as far as to make it their own channel to provide technical support. Why so? Do you honestly believe its because the whole world is not smart enough to read man pages?
Again, those who do not waste their time on man pages are the smart ones who put their own time to better use.
> Your only criticism of SO is how it improves the task of providing meaningful information to users... the value you place on gratuitous ladder-pulling
How is wanting others to learn ladder-pulling? Also, how do you assume people will have this kind of information handed to them when the people who are interested in deeply learning stop doing so, die off, etc.? If you say AI, first of all, best of luck with the hallucinations, but secondly, who is going to work on and train the AI?
> No. Writing is a skill. Producing content that the target audience is able to consume and brings value is a skill. The moment you, as an end-user, feel the need to hunker down and decipher arcane texts is the moment you should realize the documentation is bad.
I think I see the root disagreement here. You continue to mention "value," as though reading is itself not valuable. Sitting down to read a work of fiction arguably brings no value to anyone (except perhaps the author and publisher), yet millions do it anyway. Similarly, if I find a way to do something, I usually want to know if there are also other ways, and if so, if they're better. There's not much "value" there most of the time, but it brings me happiness, and enhances my knowledge of the subject.
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.