If you work for a company of more than 1 person, then helping and developing and mentoring your colleagues is part of your job, and a more important one than telling them to rtfm so you can spend those few minutes getting your own thing done.
A company isn't just a bunch of people isolating themselves and doing their best to not talk to each other.
I always tell people "Here is the documentation, please tell me what is hard to understand so I can fix it". When someone is new on my team I tell them "here is our team documentation, your first task is to fix it so that the next person can follow the directions correctly".
That is I make the conversation not about them reading the manual, but about making it worth reading. There is a large amount of really bad documentation out there.
If your customers or colleagues are asking questions answered by your documentation, it's often a good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want.
Take this valuable signal as a gift, letting you know there is an opportunity to improve the documentation. You could become known as a helpful person, rather than a maybe-efficient, antisocial loner.
If your documentation is generated (by script, tool, or AI), rather than written by a person, this goes double.
> good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want
Of course it does. And it’s not “my documentation” it’s ours. And everyone is responsible for improving it. It’s not about pointing out that documentation sucks, it’s about working to improve it.
I don’t have a documentarian on my team. No one’s main job is to write docs. So we all get to help each other by gradually improving the docs. And if I help someone with something not in the docs then the recipient gets to include that missing info into the docs to help the next person.
We also added a hat for a rotating role called “Benevolent Documentation Czar for the Quarter” where that person gets to explicitly improve team docs. Maybe like 5% of their time.
Most of the problem is people don't know to look for it and so don't try. By asking them to help improve it that means I'm not shaming them for not looking at it and so they are more likely to read it. Also once in a while I get useful suggestions for improvement and so my documentation is now the best on the project, perhaps company (this is a very low bar)
So how exactly are you supposed to distinguish needing to improve the documentation from the fact that half the population—through no fault of their own—might be fundemenetally incapable of understanding the documentation? You can only polish something so much. Without a limiting principle this becomes unfalsifiable and an endless time sink.
As a general rule you cannot get a job working in my area without fluency in English. Probably the majority of the people who work with my code have English as a second language (I work with people in Germany, India, Mexico, and Brazil that I know of), but English is a requirement to work with my area. There are probably people in sales and support areas who don't speak English, but if they need to work with me they need a translator. (I'm lucky to be a native English speaker, but there is no reason I couldn't learn a different language)
if the person is incapable of, or unwilling to, read documentation which you think they should, you can ask them honestly about it, or ask your manager about it
if management feels this person is unqualified to be in their job, they can take care of the issue
"rtfm" or the AI equivalent is being snarky while dodging the issue that you should just talk about, which is that you think this person is asking you too many questions
if they didn't rtfm they are not being respectful of your time. unless you are literally first-day brand new, you should not be approaching a mentor for help getting unstuck without an answer ready for "what have you tried?"
> if they didn't rtfm they are not being respectful of your time
Yes they are. "RTFM" may be an angsty insult thrown around in some toxic open source projects, but it's rude and inappropriate for an actual working environment where you're supposed to (and being paid to) help others. Most time spent at a company at a normal job is collaborating with others.
Your time is not so valuable that you cannot use it to make other people and the company successful, and when you're on the clock, that time belongs to the company anyways, who would likely prefer you do what's best for the company, rather than yourself.
That said, "what have you tried so far" is a good question to ask, too, to coach your colleagues on how to find info, and to get context on what would be retreading their steps.
"Collaborating" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and you're making a lot of silly accusations and presumptions. As a boss I'm not paying one employee to waste another employee's time, and I'm not paying them to teach each other when the answer is in the manual.
The question is whether one employee's time is more valuable than another employee's time. One employee answering another employee's question expends two people's time. If the answer is in the book or on the first page of google, it is wasting one of those employee's time, and that is the boss's money. If the employee asking the question makes ten times as much as the employee answering the question, and it saves him 10% of his time over flipping through the manual, it's a wash. If both employees make the same amount, or the other person even makes less, it is obviously a waste.
This is simple.
RTFM isn't an angsty insult. It is a suggestion because I am not going to answer your question if it is in the manual.
> As a boss I'm not paying one employee to waste another employee's time
Yes you are: specifically, your job as a manager is to make the company and your people successful. The way that is achieved is through collaboration.
If somebody is asking questions to a disruptive extent, then you reach out to them or their manager to have an honest conversation about it, and to level expectations about what requests for help are unreasonable.
> The question is whether one employee's time is more valuable than another employee's time
That is looking at the world as a zero-sum game. If you devote 10 minutes to help somebody, and they're 10 minutes more efficient at that task every time afterwards, then the company wins. It's not your time, it's company time, and most companies prefer that their time be spent on the most value-added thing, which is almost always force multiplication
A company isn't just a bunch of people isolating themselves and doing their best to not talk to each other.