• 𝕲𝖑𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍🔻𝕯𝖃 (he/him)@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    RTFM is not a valid response if the manual contain no information on what the software is or even how to run it (or where to even find the manual, if the manual even exists). Is this a standalone program? A plugin for another program I’m already using? No links to any useful information whatsoever.

    Then the guy that sent me the original link tells me “oh yeah, all that info is on youtube”. Nope, I’m done. I’ll use something else.

  • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
    571·
    18 hours ago

    I’ve seen this on a few repos and it never came across too harsh, the posts tagged with it were deserving. Wish I’d noted the repo names…

    I’m fine with it tbh. FOSS devs need to squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of working on the project to keep motivated. If they (or mods) can drop a helpful reply and close an issue as ‘skill issue’ and get a little chuckle while they give their time for free answering poorly-written queries or bad bug reports then that’s a reasonable trade to keep them from burning out.

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      18·
      17 hours ago

      Yeah, users might get a bit upset about “abrasive devs” but like, as you said, it’s devs that give their free time and energy into developing the project. Users honestly ought to respect that a lot more

    • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
      48·
      16 hours ago

      Whats with the whole obessesion on “giving their time for free”? What does money have to do with this? It always comes across as a copout, implying you cant disagree with FOSS devs because they work for free. Just because they aren’t earning money off off of it (aside from donations) doesnt mean they aren’t earning some sort of reward for their work, whether its personal or social.

      Besides that, its pretty common to include that type of work on a resume, which is sort of turning that work into future earnings if it helps you get a high paying job.

      I appreciate what FOSS devs do, I just hear this victim narrative come up a lot in posts about them. I’m not even sure its FOSS devs posting that type of stuff on here, it might be other people defending them.

      • Routhinator@startrek.websiteEnglish
        16·
        14 hours ago

        Anyone contributing to open source either does it:

        • on their companies dime, which means they work for a rare company building open source solutions
        • at the end of their day, on their weekend, or during their vacation

        Most FOSS devs are in position two. By a large margin. They could be relaxing, or earning more money doing freelancing to make ends meet, but instead they are trying to build something they want to see happen. That requires focusing on the important tasks and that often means not having time to spend on poorly reported bugs that are actually users just not RTFM and opening issues. It wastes the devs time, and projects with too much of this have development stagnate and are frequently shuttered.

        And devs that just do this to get a better job stop contributions once their new job takes over their life, and then the project suffers.

        Users need to appreciate FOSS devs more because some of the most important projects we need in 2025 are developed only because they want to see them happen.

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
        5·
        12 hours ago

        Who said they were victims? I said I don’t see any harm in devs being mildly abrasive as long as it helps keep their passion for the project alive.

        How many projects do you pursue in your free time for no compensation that benefit strangers all over the world, whom can file complaints about your project, asking you to remedy or change it?

        FOSS dev work is not a victim-generating machine, it’s just entirely misunderstood and underappreciated. They make a project for them, then they m0ake it free to all… and the code, and the support. But, you ask them what they dislike the most - it’s the support. The endless poorly-filled tickets, the duplicate tickets the submitter didn’t search for, the user errors that are explained clearly in the documentation. That part is thankless work. That burns people out. But if they use a joke tag on a support ticket when they close it, it’s suddenly “omg, devs are so rude”.

        […] include that type of work on a resume, which is sort of turning that work into future earnings if it helps you get a high paying job.

        Ah yes, FOSS work should be its own reward because they can say they did it. Sort of like how interns should work for free at big companies ‘for experience’, and young artists/techs/small businesses should help influencers for free because they’re ‘working for exposure’. Now that attitude is a cop-out.

        • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
          11·
          10 hours ago

          I think the way you frame it is absurd. They aren’t making things for themselves. If they were they wouldnt share it, or if they did they at least wouldnt maintain it or claim ownership over it. If devs open the door to allow outside help in, they really can’t act like they are victims when they have to socialize with other people.

          The fact that you focus on compensation really shows what’s important to you anyways, and betrays the whole spirit of FOSS in my opinion.

      • uncouple9831@lemmy.zip
        3·
        15 hours ago

        I agree in general but I don’t read the message you’re responding to as being a particularly victim-oriented narrative. It’s the internet, if someone wants to do some light trolling of people who kind of suck and it helps keep them working on a project great. It’s not like it’s the most positive thing in the world, but neither is writing an incomprehensible bug report because you followed some tutorial online and think you know how to use a computer.

        • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          12 hours ago

          I’m not opposed to handling bad reports in a cheeky manner, just the part that comes up constantly about them working for free. Its always used as an excuse, when I’d rather people just admit its more fun to take the piss out of someone sometimes and maybe everyone should lighten up a bit.

          Again, I’m not sure its even devs themselves making the “work for free” argument themselves, as the FOSS community has many advocates who aren’t devs.

          • uncouple9831@lemmy.zip
            2·
            11 hours ago

            Yeah that’s fair

            I think if you view the work you’re doing as working for free you’ve already lost the plot a bit. I mean people can do stuff for different reasons but it’d be like a die hard capitalist working to make buses free. It’s just weird.

  • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    91·
    18 hours ago

    Good idea.

    I shall have to add a “skill issue” label to my git repos.

  • Axolotl@feddit.it
    154·
    1 day ago

    I swear, i have read some issues…

    So, i sometimes help people who have problems with an android CLI launcher

    There is a fucking command called, “help” and when you open the launcher one of the first thing you see is “write help to get a command list”, you write help and you get a list of all commands and there is even a wiki (not complete though) that explain some commands and they STILL ASK “can you add [command that already exist]?”.
    So i kinda feel why some people want a skill issue tag

    • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world
      611·
      1 day ago

      I’d say “sure!” Then amaze them with how good and quick I am by telling them an hour or two later to "try it now "

      What you describe sounds more like a “competence” issue than a skill issue - can’t have the latter without first having the former.

      • ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de
        15·
        15 hours ago

        That way you teach them that

        • you are somehow a magician
        • they can ask for any stupid thing and you will do it right away for them because what else should you be doing
        • it doesn’t matter if this feature even fits into your plans because all you want to do is grant every wish
        • a new feature is written and will appear instantly at the users computer. Who cares about testing or of this breaks other features as long as this guy is happy

        They are beginner devs, so they should learn to understand how things work.

    • MaggiWuerze@feddit.org
      6·
      1 day ago

      A launcher in the sense that lawnchair is? as in, the thing you see when no app is open?
      because that would be sick as hell as an android launcher

      • Axolotl@feddit.it
        7·
        20 hours ago

        Yeah, it’s open source too! If you are interessed it’s called “Yantra Launcher” on the playstore it has a minimal version(with less commands) and a pro version to support the developer but you can build the launcher yourself if you want

    • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      I mean, not that I’m ever going to contest the existence of idiots, I myself sometimes cosplay as one, but if ‘help’ isn’t quoted in the original instructions, I’m not going to blame people for not parsing the sentence correctly.

  • downvote_hunter@midwest.socialEnglish
    321·
    1 day ago

    Here’s what I’ll say, management taught a generation of devs to ask instead of researching, aka rtfm. If I had a quarter for the number of times I was told to ask for help sooner by a non tech manager I could have retired by now and had a farm.

    • luciferofastora@feddit.org
      7·
      16 hours ago

      From personal experience:

      One part is manuals / docs being hard to use. Some seem to assume a measure familiarity with the subject, creating a certain entry barrier. They’re perfectly usable as reference for people who know the gist but look up details, but for younger devs, it’s disheartening to get the sense that you don’t understand anything. That’s a common issue with FOSS tools, in my experience, where the devs naturally prioritise developing the actual tool. Asking and getting an answer for a specific example can help get a foothold and start climbing that, but it’s no guarantee.

      A second part is that manuals don’t always cover things you can’t do (because obviously it’s hard to predict what people would come up with wanting to do), but it’s hard to tell whether that’s just incomplete unless you ask and get an explicit, hard “nope”. Bonus points for commercial products documenting what you can do, but not with your current license: You’ll diligently read the page for what you want to do, attempt to implement it, then be hit with “please upgrade to Premium for this feature”.

      A third part is terminology. Just like the non-features, it’s impossible to predict all the ways someone might describe what they want to do if they don’t know any better way to phrase it. I’d count language barriers into this as well, which is an issue that a smaller, US-heavy software development world wouldn’t have had to the same degree as we do today.

      And finally, of course, there’s convenience, which is where I think the managers have the greatest impact: The less time you have to spend learning how to RTFM or digging through the docs, the less time is “wasted” on things that aren’t immediately productive. Particular non-IT-background managers may not appreciate the value of such skills, so they’d rather have you spend someone else’s time taking a shortcut than invest your own.

      So I think this is an issue arising naturally from several independent factors, which makes it hard to tackle effectively. Managers should plan for and encourage taking time to understand the manual, but I don’t see a universal solution to the documentation quality and language barriers.

      Also, retiring to have a farm is a mood.

        • luciferofastora@feddit.org
          3·
          16 hours ago

          Your target group and the effective user base might not strictly overlap. You can’t always anticipate that. Even if your target group is junior devs, it may be hard to accurately imagine their perspective on something you’re necessarily more familiar with. And even if you do, investing the time to explain and document may detract from the fun you have actually achieving “milestones” in terms of features. Particularly for many open source projects, the devs’ fun is ultimately the driving factor.

          It’s a start, but not a full solution.

    • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
      12·
      21 hours ago

      That’s preferable to people who don’t ask for help until everything is hopelessly fucked because they kept trying to solve their problem different git commands, none of which they understood.

      • expr@programming.dev
        2·
        16 hours ago

        Eh, git is never really that fucked. If you understand how it works, it’s generally not hard to get back to a state you want (assuming everything has been committed at some point, ofc).

        I would much rather people try to spend some time trying to understand and solve a problem first. I had a “senior” engineer who would message me literally every morning about whatever issue he was facing and it drove me absolutely nuts. Couldn’t do anything for himself. Unsurprisingly, he was recently laid off.

        My time should be respected.

        • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          10 hours ago

          Seniors should know their shit. If a junior doesn’t need help they’re either not doing their job or not a junior.

          I think you haven’t met “problem solvers” as creative as the ones I’ve met. My first job out of college I built an inventory system for a small engineering firm. One of the engineers tried to solve his problem instead of asking for help. Once he gave up and called us, it took us an entire day just to figure out how he had managed to screw things up as badly as he did.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      36·
      1 day ago

      It’s because for every dev who asks too soon there’s another dev somewhere that doesn’t ask at all, bills 300 hours their first month without being asked to, delivers nothing because they refused to ask for help and couldn’t figure it out either. That dev is why people hate off-shoring to India. They did not work a second month.