Brown M&Ms, or Why No One Reads the Manual

I am watching and listening intently the ones that I am interested in. Episodes with Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey jr. or Russel Brand, I watched in full in one sitting. I can also watch bunch of episodes cooking, checking other stuff.

I always write the docs. I point to the docs when I get questions. Most people skim over the once and then just ask questions later when they forget. I don't like being a human encyclopedia.

I manage the "support" (mostly DMCA) tickets for some small website we run as a hobby project without monetization whatsoever (aka "for fun"). People are free to use it, e.g for chat and to share content (i.e. DMCA magnet). It's maybe like 5-20 such tickets per day, most of which are DMCA and can be handled really quick, so it isn't that much of a time drag.

Not actually getting paid/having an employer there can be quite liberating...

Since nobody who ever writes me is a customer, and I am not getting paid anyway, I am more or less free in what level of politeness I apply. I usually try to model my response after the initial requests I receive - taking into account other factors like people who might be genuinely upset; or confuse me with the person who actually uploaded a piece of content.

We have users from all over the world, and it's rather interesting to see particular patterns/attitudes with certain types of locales.

For example, Americans - by and large - are too lazy to read the few lines of text on our contact page detailing what information we need to address what kind of problem, and often are rather rude from the get-go, and really like to threaten with their lawyers (plural!) in the initial email when it comes to copyright or related issues. This then leads to me asking for the missing details, followed by a lot of them demanding to talk to my supervisor, to which I then point out that they are not our customers and that being rude or even outright insulting the only person who could potentially help them (for free) isn't maybe the best idea they ever had... And if the supervisor demand came up, I point out that I do not have a supervisor, I demand to talk to their supervisor instead.

It would be unfair to only unload on Americans, tho. We got a lot of Portuguese users, and tickets from the Portuguese are even more rude on average and of course nobody bothers to read the instructions, tho nobody ever demands to talk to my supervisor. The French are polite but like to make outrageous demands, but seem to read the instructions. Germans are "professional"-polite but tend to write LOOONG emails, and when it comes to copyrights usually cite a lot of completely unrelated laws, but again read the instructions. Middle/South Americans are usually polite but constantly think the Subject line is where all their text is supposed to go, and do not read the instructions. I'd say the most pleasant people are the East European (mostly Polish and Russian) people who write me... I don't remember anybody outright rude from East Europe ever, tho the language barrier - our website is English only incl the instructions - is often rather obvious (but I will not fault anybody for that, of course).

Point being: the level of RTFM in my limited experience differs quite a bit depending on locale.

Very much this. New hires must always be tasked to improve onboarding documentation. At a previous place I worked, I went from expecting it to take a new hire several months to be productive to less than a couple weeks and a big reason was continuing to have newbies tweak docs and fill in details that might be easy to gloss over by soneone who already knows the tech.

As for containers, I’m not sure I follow. We ended up using vagrant and then test kitchen for our VMs, which really helped with on boarding. The team had too many people who couldn’t be expected to troubleshoot much of the backend anyways. We had stayed away from containerization because it added complexity without any clear benefits for our use cases. But test kitchen definitely papered over the need to get a local environment running with all the dependencies, which might change with different services, and that seemed like a good thing.

I'm tired of advertisements posing as blog posts. Can Hacker News include a notice on posts like these?