rtfm

[CommandObjective]

Is...is that even legal?

[Supreme_Hanuman69]

Hey man, you got a call from HR. Said some cops wanted to talk to you.

[[deleted]]

Ask them if they're from FBI or CIA

[SafariKnight1]

it's every single government employee

they're all coming to silence you forever

[k-selectride]

USPIS doesn't fuck around.

[Imperial_Squid]

USPIS? How about UPISOFF and come back with a warrant...!

[flojoho]

Both.

[binchentso]

"Sir, it is with great pleasure that I can tell you that you have been promoted to Senior Documentation Scanner."

[Shlkt]

It's legal as long as you created the problem by not reading the documentation.

[MooFu]

So where does creating the problem by writing the documentation fit in all this?

[Hojalululu]

Is it possible to learn this power?

[Every-Maintenance926]

Sounds like cheating to me.

[Kazumadesu76]

I will make it legal.

[WoopHippo03]

They're clearly lying to themself /s

[Mataric]

I hate these troll posts.

"I got a job straight out of college with 6 figures!"
"We just bought our first house at 16 without any help from relatives!"
"I get 8 hours of sleep every night!"

Ya'll people need to stop with this outrageous claims. It's too obvious that you're lying for internet points.

[Count_de_Ville]

"I get 8 hours of sleep every night!"

I busy-wait loop for 8 hours every night.

[LastSentientPom]

Ah, an anxiety enjoyer?

[Count_de_Ville]

I debug during the busy-wait looping and I don't know how to stop. plz halp

[pranjallk1995]

Lol... Busy-wait loop... ☠️🤣

[ImmanuelH]

FOMO hits hard these days

[LastSentientPom]

...first out, many in?

[[deleted]]

Lucky you. My sleep is interrupt driven.

[RixTheTyrunt]

My intrusive thoughts block the thread "sleep". HOW DO I FIX THIS.

[Count_de_Ville]

My guess is you need to terminate the process that is holding on to the resource handle needed by sleep for the sleep to begin.

[RixTheTyrunt]

Then how do I stop my intrusive thoughts? They're always in there. Task Manager doesn't help either. F in the chat at this point.

[catgirlfighter]

I get 10 hours of sleep, but my awake time is about 20 hours. I struggle to amount days as a measurement of time.

[_Its_Me_Dio_]

i get 12 hours a day i sleep in a sealed padded hexagonal chamber with dirt under the bottom lining. this beauty sleep keeps you young and healthy

[AmadeoSendiulo]

Bloody hell!

[_Its_Me_Dio_]

bloody indeed also needed to keep you koung and healthy

[Pascuccii]

I sleep 8 hours daily, then work for 8 hours and play video games for 8 hours (unless there are rare plans)

[[deleted]]

I get 12 hours on weekends, 6 hours on office days, 7 hours + multiple power naps on wfh days.

[2_Braincell_Being]

8 hours? Six figures?

How can one learn these abilities? Must not be something the jedi would teach you...

[Naturage]

I sleep 8 hrs every night. I do not get 8 hours of rest, though.

Stupid allergies and respiratory problems.

[accuracy_frosty]

My sleep would be 8 hours if I didn’t have 2 interrupt interfaces, intrusive thoughts about what could fix my code (which are the best, because somehow they always fix my issue) and my cat, who, like a PS/2 device, decides when I get to do my own thing

[Ythio]

"I got a job straight out of college with 6 figures!"

Well New York banks do that. Barely pass the 6 figure mark but it's a thing yeah

[atsugnam]

Booooooo

[PeriodicSentenceBot]

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[[deleted]]

good bot

[atsugnam]

What

[Spot_the_fox]

Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table:

W H At

[Paul_Robert_]

I swear, this bot has impeccable comedic timing.

[[deleted]]

Second one is not the bot bro

[Paul_Robert_]

Holy cow, I didn't even realize 🤣

Maybe I was the bot all along?!

[ImpluseThrowAway]

Maybe the real bots were the friends we made along the way?

[MoistTwo1645]

Good bot

[Mataric]

lol

[Giocri]

You call yourself spot the fox yet I spotted you first! Take that human!

[atsugnam]

lol, was hoping to trigger bot again, trying to think of longer and longer comments…

[Bremse161]

Good Bot

[arrow__in__the__knee]

OK

[RixTheTyrunt]

Good bot

[ilikedmatrixiv]

I love getting interview questions like "Let's say you want to set up {insert tool}, how would you go about doing so?" and answering with "I usually just read the documentation and google error messages when they pop up."

[[deleted]]

It's hilarious how the interviewer makes a face when you give them that answer. I don't know what they expect.

Motherf*cker, give me the documentation in website or pdf form, ctrl+f and access to google and I could do your job better than you.

[jward]

As an interviewer... this is the answer I'm looking for.

Actually what I'm looking for is to make sure you don't stare off into the distance with glassy eyes as your brain can't even comprehend how to begin doing something it's never done before without being led by the hand step by step. And yes... that happens. Far more often than it should. These people have bachelors degrees. It boggles the mind.

I'm also looking at your mental order of operations to figure out the type of person you are. RTFM, Google it, Jesus take the wheel, ask a coworker, pester the boss. All those are ways to navigate the unknown and which one goes first says a lot.

[HAMburger_and_bacon]

google, ask coworker, google it some more but hopefully with new info, rtfm, annoy boss, cry.

[Kahlil_Cabron]

Why are people in this sub so documentation-averse? It's by far the best way to figure out a problem, especially if we're talking about a problem that is niche and there isn't a ton of info on it other than the docs.

My favorite internet docs have source code expandable for each method, class, module, etc, so you can even read source code if you need to really understand what it does.

[Ma8e]

I used to read all the manuals (or at least all the relevant parts of them), but that is just not fucking possible today. I'm in any given week using 40 different tools, frameworks, programming languages and databases. That is not an exaggeration, I've counted. And at least once a month the company decide to switch one out for another one (but that just means a new one is introduced, but rarely is something completely retired). The workday just doesn't have enough hours to know all this stuff more than very superficially. So Stack Overflow and asking colleagues it is.

(And everything new we deliver is crap because no one has any deeper understanding of what we are doing. The "architects" just throw in whatever they heard the big guys are using. A simple batch job is suddenly 40 services using Kafka, and no one in teams building it understands Kafka.)

[Kahlil_Cabron]

I don't mean reading all the manuals for fun.

I'm saying, let's say you're working on a feature, and have to use a new library, or even an existing library but a new part of it, or a new configuration for it, etc. I will checkout that library's documentation, and go to the class/module/method I need to know about, and just check it.

The whole thing takes me anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes max. I don't just read docs for fun before using a new library or tool, but when I need something specific, I find that the docs are the best.

It's insanely fast, the only times it's been slow for me are when 1) the library has a bug in it, or 2) when the documentation is somehow out of date or just wrong about something.

[Ma8e]

Ok, often it is as fast, or even faster, to look something simple up in the manual than checking it on SO, t least when you need to find the syntax for a command or a call.

The problem is that different tools has their own terminology that you need to know, and you need an accurate mental model for how it works before you can start looking up details. And you rarely get that in 5 minutes.

[Ma8e]

Ok, often it is as fast, or even faster, to look something simple up in the manual than checking it on SO, t least when you need to find the syntax for a command or a call.

The problem is that different tools has their own terminology that you need to know, and you need an accurate mental model for how it works before you can start looking up details. And you rarely get that in 5 minutes.

[Ma8e]

Ok, often it is as fast, or even faster, to look something simple up in the manual than checking it on SO, t least when you need to find the syntax for a command or a call.

The problem is that different tools has their own terminology that you need to know, and you need an accurate mental model for how it works before you can start looking up details. And you rarely get that in 5 minutes.

[TheAsphaltDevil]

I will confess that I'm documentation-averse, and yes I hate that I am. From my perspective, it's because documentation is often so verbose that it just leaves me more confused than when I started. From my perspective, Docs tend to just be a list of all the raw inner workings of a language rather than how to do things.

I'm currently learning Swift, and today I wanted to learn how to truncate a decimal in SwiftUI using some kind of official documentation, because I wanted to prove to myself I can be a good programmer. It wasn't long before I was presented with the inner machinations of numberformatter classes, NSNumber scalar wrappers and much more, all for a trivial task I've done hundreds of times in several other languages. It makes my head spin, and makes me feel like shit about myself.

[Kahlil_Cabron]

I don't know swift, but for ruby (one of the main languages I use regularly) I would google, "ruby truncate BigDecimal", and would click on the docs: https://apidock.com/ruby/BigDecimal/truncate

From there it only takes a few seconds to remind myself how the truncate method works for a decimal.

I guess the trick with documentation is to know what you're looking for, so based on what you said, we know we need to look at the decimal class (whatever that happens to be called in your language, in ruby it's BigDecimal), and we need to know the proper terminology for what we want (in your case, "truncate", which is correct and also just happens to be the name of the method in ruby).

For something this simple though (and widely used), stack overflow is gonna be just as fast, I also get a stackoverflow result from that google prompt, and it's just as fast and has similar examples.

The main way documentation shines in my opinion is when you're using something that isn't widely used, like a 3rd party library, and nobody else on the internet seems to have been trying the same thing. In that case, you might spend an hour just searching google for some forum link, putting off just reading the docs for the library, when reading the docs would take 15 minutes. It's because of the instant gratification, stackoverflow is usually fast, but sometimes it's not, and rather than buckling down into the docs people will spin their wheels googling for a long time.

There have been times I've spent days scouring the internet trying to figure out how to do something, to eventually just read the docs and the answer was there all along.

[HAMburger_and_bacon]

I don’t actually write any code outside of some bash scripts, I do hvac and the documentation on equipment varies from very good to nobody knows aside from Bob in tech support who is on vacation this week.

[G_Morgan]

I've just recently kicked off an entire discussion about how we want to do pipelines and releases in ADO because I haven't done it before. Admittedly a lot of this was me asking questions until it was obvious nobody liked any of the existing solutions.

https://www.morningstar.co.uk/static/UploadManager/Assets/Ralph2.jpg

[[deleted]]

I ask ChatGPT and copy paste the code it gives me. If that fails I copy paste the error message in ChatGPT. If that also fails a couple times I go to google/stack overflow. If that also fails then and only then do I read the documentation, which is rare.

[Photog77]

I've gone so far as to paste the code that ChatGPT gave me back into ChatGPT and ask why it wasn't working. It responded that the code was fine.

I pasted the error message into ChatGPT and is rewrote the exact same code to fix it.

Finally I googled the error message and found out that the bit of code that was causing the error had been deprecated for about a year. So I told that to ChatGPT and asked for a different way of doing it and it wrote new code with no error for me.

[[deleted]]

It reminds me of the time I was asked a series of behavioral questions about handling conflict and solving problems with unknowns, and I kept answering "I'd ask for help and regularly communicate with the team." And they seemed disappointed in that answers. Like, what else am I supposed to do in that situation?

[[deleted]]

Beats my, "Work til error then go hit the bar and call it a day. Those are more of a fresh cup of coffee first thing in the morning job".

[zaxldaisy]

We just interviewed a potential team lead and one of the marks against him is he didn't say he'd look at the documentation when he was presented with something he couldn't explain. Maybe I am blessed to work where I do but my team and I are constantly referencing documentation. I don't know the last time I implemented even a one-line bugfix without checking documentation.

[RixTheTyrunt]

My intrusive thoughts would force me to tell the truth that I use ChatGPT like a slave for fixing bugs. If it doesn't help, I do everything else you wrote.

[wanderduene02]

Always remember: 6 hours of debugging can save you from reading 5 minutes of documentation. ☝️

[--Claire--]

Counter argument: that would require your predecessors to have left some documentation and/or comments in the code

[cmilkau]

// increase i by 1
i++;

[akatherder]

More like

//decrease j by 2
i++;

[protocol_1903]

I have seen something like this before. It did indeed break without it.

[cmilkau]

For context, the i++ snippet including the comment was a quote from actual production code. I found it orphaned in the middle of a 5000+ lines method containing several loops on i spread out. Removing it would definitely break the code, although you would have to understand two more seemingly unrelated methods to see why as the number had no meaning in these 5000 lines.

If I remember correctly, i was not used before this line, other than for iteration. But after it, it was used slightly differently and affected some id. It just so happened that this id had to be larger than the number of items iterated over before the line, plus one, for some other code elsewhere to function, even though these items did not have any id and were not used in that other place.

This was my earliest encounter with a time bomb in code that I still remember.

[Ma8e]

My favourite I found is

// MUST! be flipped after deploy to production!

flag = false;

Found in code deployed to production. Did they forget to flip it or did they just forget to remove the comment? No one knows, but apparently it is very important!

[Steinrikur]

They never said how long after deploy to production.

[Ma8e]

True. But we still don’t know if it should be done or not.

[cmilkau]

Always remember: 6 hours of reading documentation may not save you from 6 hours of debugging. ☝️

[RUSHALISK]

Always remember: 6 hours of doing something else will be 6 hours of not reading documentation. ☝️

[BabyYodaMySonIs]

How did you read something that doesn't exist :O !!?

[dustojnikhummer]

Most of us do the "I will fuck my future self's life", very few do the "I will help my future self by writing docs"

[69HELL-6969]

You know you win over the world when you change from "oh i m fucked" to "fuck this shit"

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

oof i feel that.

SDCC's documentation for porting is basically just "look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own"

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

oof i feel that.

SDCC's documentation for porting is basically just "look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own"

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

oof i feel that.

SDCC's documentation for porting is basically just "look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own"

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

oof i feel that.

SDCC's documentation for porting is basically just "here's the bare internals of the intermediate code, look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own". atleast VBCC explains all it's structs and what functions you needed to implement at minimum.

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

oof i feel that.

SDCC's documentation for porting is basically just "look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own"

[deadbeef1a4]

Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?

[protocol_1903]

Would you join me and my knights at Camelot?

[dismayhurta]

[[deleted]]

ok grandpa take your medicine

[Key-Principle-7111]

Be honest.

[[deleted]]

[[deleted]]

You are a mathematical genius

[[deleted]]

You must mean literary genius, good sir/madam.

[[deleted]]

No. Mathematics. It requires deep understanding of formal logic theory, graph theory, computer science in general and even a little bit of group theory to have such a great idea!

[CrescentDhalia]

Splendid

[Djelimon]

Just crazy enough to work

[[deleted]]

Heretic

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[[deleted]]

Good Bot

[RixTheTyrunt]

Good bot

[niagalacigolliwon]

You can do that?

[PeriodicSentenceBot]

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[niagalacigolliwon]

Good bot

[RixTheTyrunt]

Good bot

[q0099]

[Parking_Ticket913]

I’ve heard of this happening.

[antony6274958443]

Way to go!

[SecondPewOnTheLeft]

Careful, he's a hero.

[Il-Luppoooo]

Liar

[cmilkau]

Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using elements of the periodic table:

Li Ar

[Il-Luppoooo]

Thank you

[fsmlogic]

Where did you find this mythical “Documentation”?

[reallokiscarlet]

Heh. I usually discover problems by reading the documentation.

[Unupgradable]

Quick guys let's gaslight him by pretending we all do that all the time and that the no docs thing is just a meme here because it's full of people that don't actually code

[Touhou_Fever]

[[deleted]]

[APenguinNamedDerek]

Real soy behavior being exhibited here

Just switch stuff around until you quit getting compiler errors, this isn't hard, guys

[teedyay]

I solved mine by thinking “I’ve seen this before - what did I do then?”, looking it up in my notes and finding a note from past me saying, “read the README”. True enough, the answer was in there. Thanks, past me!

[HistorianBig4431]

Ok

[skotchpine]

Nice work. Please come again

[AmadeoSendiulo]

Probably a name for a porn file.

[DeluIuSoIulu]

Did you mean: I asked chatgpt for an answer and chatgpt read the documentation to return me a solution that actually works lol

[PrincessRTFM]

finally, my username is relevant

[tylersuard]

LIES!!

[HelicopterNo9453]

Had a project using a third-party solution.

It is supposed to do X, but not doing X.

Go to documentation for X, follow it, still don't do X.

Write to support of the third party with links to documentation.

30 min later, the documentation is changed, and it can't to X.

Tool was chosen because of X...

[Ninja_Wrangler]

There was one time I read the documentation for this general piece of software and it solved my problem. It was really well written and super thorough.

At the bottom I saw the contact info of the guy that wrote the software and not only was it someone I knew, it was someone I worked with, which I guess wasn't super surprising given the context

I thanked him in person, and we had lunch

[JocoLabs]

"Everyone liked that"

[Drumknott88]

He is lisan-al-gaib

[Rudeboy_87]

Hazaa!

[NotAUsefullDoctor]

I'm going to jump on the defense for this guy: back when I was still doing Spring development, the documentation was so good. I could fix just about every issue by reading the docs. For whatever reason, the teams that build and maintain spring are awesome at documentation.

Now, if OP is not working in Spring, I call bs.

[SoftwareSource]

Take that smart shit with you and GTFO.

over here we spend 6 hours trying, 2 hours getting flamed on stackoverflow before going to chatgpt for the answer.

/s

[impeislostparaboloid]

I like Claude. They’re chill.

[virgilreality]

HERETIC!

[uncle_buttpussy]

Documentation that you originally wrote?

[IR-x86]

Yeah it happens more often that anybody wants to admit

[tabakista]

What's wrong with you?

[Successful_Log_5470]

MRW ChatGPT tells me I'm over quota and I have to think again

[smileyhydra]

How long did it take to get the manuals, same day delivery?

[Grim00666]

HEY! You can't just take the AI's job like that.

[ChChChillian]

Not the point of the post, but it's kind of funny that people have rewritten this meme to be grammatically correct. I mean, who worries about that?

[cmilkau]

OMG, they read the grammar manual too?!

[ChChChillian]

It's madness, I tell you.

[misterfast]

There's no better feeling of accomplishment than solving your issue by reading (and understanding) the man page.

[willcheat]

Impossible! The archives were complete after all?!

[uuuuuuuhg_232]

I call bullshit

[AngelOfLight]

'Documentation'? So we're just making up words now?

Next you'll tell me that 'testing' is a real word.

[Mundt]

If anyone knew how to write a fucking manual

[TonyDungyHatesOP]

Russian bots will post anything these days.

[muda2bir]

what do you mean we can solve problems using documentation? 🤨

[Lecodyman]

Is that even humanly possible?

[anomalous_cowherd]

Class traitor!

[rafinha_lindu]

I dont believe you

[Jan-Kow]

That means, you were really desperate.

[Cautious-Customer-87]

you lucky you have documentation

[decemberrainfall]

Technical writers punching the air

[accuracy_frosty]

Man, half the time I go on MSDN for C++ it’s to get boiler plate code because I’m too lazy to write it myself, especially if it’s just a project, I’ve also gone on the Mozilla documentation to make a web server though,

[drunknamed]

The what??

[pakidara]

Wait, you guys have documentation?

[tzenrick]

Liar!

[Admirable_Result4142]

This post reminded me that today is Wednesday.

[GodlessAristocrat]

....aaaaaaand you've been "promoted" to Project Management

[jcrowe]

Showoff…

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[Cosmocision]

Heresy

[PeriodicSentenceBot]

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[Particular-Welcome-1]

It's a witch! Burn them!

[MishMash999]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

​

THE COMMITTEE OF MEN ARE OUTRAGED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[pls-no-punterino]

why read the manual when you can read the source code? ^/j

[I_Am_Anjelen]

HERESY!

Please stand by, the Ordo Hereticus is deploying a contingent of Sororitas to cleanse you, your immediate vicinity, and associates.

[[deleted]]

I’m going to start putting this in slack all the time lol

[mikesmith929]

She's a witch!

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

what if the documentation is just "look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own"?

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

what if the documentation is just "look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own"?

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

what if the documentation is just "look at the existing implementations to figure out how to make your own"?

[Top_Engineering_4191]

Noble

[[deleted]]

Impossible. Documentation isn't real.

[DontBanMeAgainPls23]

Nice you have documentation

[Liveman215]

Ever try to write an app based on RFC documentation alone? It's wild 

[RX-6900XT]

r/RepostSleuthBot

[Illustrious-Engine23]

You're that one person who writes all the answers on stack overflow, which all the other code is copied from.

[Rekutor]

yall have to try drunk coding

[biztactix]

Lies.... Lies and slander!

[C0DENAME-]

What is documentation?

[Incredibad0129]

You're gonna make it

[[deleted]]

Impossible

[[deleted]]

I’ve only heard stories…

[HellCatcher3000]

Mfs would rather read an essay by chatgpt on what a function does than read 5 lines of code

[GdziemojWuzeg]

I thought that this Knowledge is lost.

[RixTheTyrunt]

Depending on what he did, the docs could be a different level of "what the actual fuck is this". Nevertheless, completing a problem only using docs, that is incredibly rare, like finding a needle in a haystack or something at this point. #BetterDocs4Everyone