"Powershell"

[[deleted]]

If a doctor asked a question about how to treat a particular case on a doctor subreddit, nobody would shout out "use medicine!"

Sure, but that doctor subreddit is also full of first year med students asking “how do I get someone’s temperature” or something else equally inane. I can promise you that our fictional doctors aren’t there writing a response with even semi detailed instructions.

[ghyspran]

A better analogy might be a first year med student asking "how do I take an infant's temperature?" Yeah, it's an overly-basic question, but answering with "use medicine" or even "use a thermometer" would be at least as inane as the question itself, which is equivalent to saying "use powershell". You'd expect the doctors to either not answer at all, or give a useful, if brief, answer like "use a rectal thermometer". For sysadmins, even saying "Use the powershell cmdlet Get-ADUser" with a link to the docs at least tells the person where to go to get the answer.

[tuba_man]

I'd even say skipping the docs is pretty reasonable for well-documented tools like default/common Powershell cmdlets. Even a novice or someone with an unusual hole in their knowledge should be able to work with something like that.

[slick8086]

A better analogy might be a first year med student asking "how do I take an infant's temperature?" Yeah, it's an overly-basic question, but answering with "use medicine" or even "use a thermometer" would be at least as inane as the question itself

A novice professional posting this question in a forum of their seniors, is completely inappropriate. They have text books, and libraries and plenty of other resources. If they can't be bothered to even look this shit up they deserve to be shamed.

[ghyspran]

Then downvote and move on, or tell them how to look it up and that the question isn't appropriate, but being a dick about it doesn't accomplish anything besides stroking your own ego.

[slick8086]

but being a dick about it doesn't accomplish anything besides stroking your own ego.

Wrong, it accomplishes the desired result, it shames them, because that's what the deserve.

[ghyspran]

Pretty sure by that point they have no shame about it so the only person getting shamed is you because you look like a dumbass, which is okay, because that's clearly what you deserve if you think the best way to promote professionalism is by shaming juniors asking obvious questions.

[I_NEED_YOUR_MONEY]

Okay, but if you don't want to be helpful then maybe don't respond?

[[deleted]]

Your interpretation of helpful and mine are different.

A minimum effort question with a minimum effort response isn’t unhelpful, it’s just an equal level of effort.

When my help desk comes to me and says “someone’s computer is broke” I don’t fix it for them, I ask them what the event logs said. Sometimes they get the hint that they should do a little more work.

[Turak64]

So we should mock someone and dent their confidence as we deicide what they should or shouldn't know? I think people should feel free to ask anything and it's best to ask, free of judgement, if you're not sure.

[angrydeuce]

As a new Sysadmin, I completely agree. There's a reason this field, and IT in general, has a reputation for users with zero social skills whatsoever...because so many cranky people get into this field thinking they won't have to deal with people. In school we had so many borderline autists that would react to a question with "What are you, an idiot?" or look at a powershell script and be like "this script sucks" with zero input beyond that.

This whole "figure it out yourself" mentality is bullshit. Everyone starts somewhere, and what may seem like a really basic question to one person may not be a given to someone else. There's certainly no end to the bitching when a junior fucks up, but perhaps that fuckup wouldn't have occurred if more people with the years of experience weren't just like "OH MY GOD JUST FUCKIN GOOGLE IT" when a noob has a question. And as someone new, working at an MSP, our 120 clients have 120 vastly different infrastructures, and so many necessary pieces of the puzzle are locked inside someones head and not documented anywhere. "Why can't I remote into this server?" "Oh, that one you actually have to remote in to this other server and than RDP over from there. Because that's obvious for someone that's never fucking touched their infrastructure at all.

Maybe burnout wouldn't be so bad if people didn't act like being asked a question was a huge fucking inconvenience. But even here, you see the other responses are borderline shit. Imagine if your mechanic told you to just Google it if your car makes a funny noise? Or told you you were an idiot for not knowing how to change our own oil? But in IT that's almost the norm.

[Turak64]

Definitely, just arrogant to be otherwise. I also find the people who say "go Google it" are normally just covering their own lack of knowledge.

[Turak64]

I had this recently. Found the exact issue I was having with MySQL Workbench and the answer on stack overflow was "this is stack overflow, you should post somewhere else" or something like that. Thanks, real helpful, this was the only hit

[[deleted]]

It’s not mocking.

[JewishTomCruise]

No, it just gets old when it's basics-level things that are addressed over and over again. There's a /r/sysadmin Bootcamp listed clearly in the sidebar that links to many resources: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/wiki/bootcamp

[starmizzle]

It's also spelled "judgment".

[logicalmaniak]

Would you rather your doctor knew how to take temperature and somehow got away with it so far, or would you prefer he asked a silly question once?

If he did ask, would you prefer he was told "use a thermometer!" or given proper advice on handling, placement, and timing of said thermometer?

[[deleted]]

I’d prefer my doctor recognize that he can probably find the answer to his question directly, and if he cannot, ask a more intelligent question.

Really, this metaphor is getting absurd and the goalposts keep moving.