...my ego is bruised. Someone just hit me with the ole “RTFM!!”

😵🤣🤣

And? Hadn't you?

@Fast-Nop mostly. But I didn’t inspect the sequence diagram as closely as I should have. As a result, I was slammed with a “RTFM ya n00b”.

It's surprisingly easy to forget about the manual and get caught up in trying to solve everything on your own... I think I tell someone to RTFM at least once a week, and tell myself to RTFM more than that..

Yeah, skipped a couple steps myself recently 'cause I thought I had it. It's a nice reminder to get once in a while :-)

I applied the "RTFM" standard too much that my supervisor told me to just ask him/other dev the 10 min questions in person rather than delving my head for 3 hours reading docs and scourging the internet for hints.

:/

@cho-uc unless what you're trying to solve is really time-sensitive, they're making you miss on valuable learning opportunities :/

TYMTSCM!

@cho-uc @miksaraj has a point..
RTFM is great learning oportunity, but you also have to learn when it's best 'to give up' and just ask for help.

And also pray that when you ask for help because the 'bug' is bugging you that the more experienced devs don't also go WTF when presented with the code that should be doing A but instead it draws silly eff you faces all over the screen..

Happened more than once that I was trying to figure out on my own what I was doing wrong in the implementation..asked for help, got explanation on how to properly do something which was exactly how I did it in the first place.. We spent some more time debugging it together and couldn't figure out why it was behaving weird.. turned out it was a bug in the framework/library/driver..ended up rewriting around it..

Ome might say wasted time, I say time spent learning that it's not always my fault if something is not working like it should.
And most importantly: if there's a will there's a way..a bit longer with obstacles and loooads of curves, but there is one..

One time a coworker hit me with rtfm when I was pissed off about ux of some website. I mean where I can get a manual for a fucking random website? Hes a weird dude.

What's also good is asking "where do I find the document that descibes this", or even "where does this document describe this" - after having tried to find it of course.

Or, from the answering side, first "check out document X", and if that's not enough, which chapter of the document.

In the first project of my current job, I had to use a proprietary tool that had quite some quirks, so I asked where to find the user manual. THERE WAS NONE. Everyone had learnt how to cope with that crap, but nobody had written it down.

So I learnt it the hard way, too, and then made a simple mini-howto that described what bugs the tool had and how to work around them. That was the first document I wrote in my current company.

If the documentation sucks, don't put up with it - improve it!

@Fast-Nop At our company if you ask where the docs for X thing are, you owe a six pack to the support team 🤣🤣🤣😇

@sladuled Its almost as if they are working for free

@zemaitis Not sure about their pay.. some are great workers some are slackers..
Some actually write down what needs to be done and put it in the manual of sorts..
But the 'you owe us beer' ritual still lingers here as a joke if nothing else..

Red Teaming Field Manual? I think I have the wrong definition...

@linuxxx Remember To Flush Man!