Earlier quoted context omitted.
People just straight-up don’t want to learn. There are always exceptions, of course, 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.
> 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…
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.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/4221094
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the...
[2]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reset#Documentation/git-reset.t...
[3]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/419163/what-does-if-name...