On 2010-01-24 at 15:08:57 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > I guess I'm just kinda down on Roman after he sent that Gmail invite to this > list a while ago. And it seems that he's using debian-users as a personal > tutor > while building his system, asking here first thing every time he runs into a > small gotcha, even the really simple stuff. Look at his posts, and the volume > of such, for the past month. > > We all need help now and then, but sheesh... > > Maybe I'm being a bit hypocritical, as I tended to flood #debian on IRC eons > ago > when I first started using Debian. And, guess what? The kind folks there > told > me the same I told Roman: Make some effort to look this stuff up yourself > instead of flooding this forum. ;)
I used to be an applications developer myself. I wrote custom software for users at a large company. (Unfortunately, the specific skill sets I used back then, such as PL/I, REXX, etc., are pretty much useless in Linux. But I digress.) Anyway, after I wrote the program, I would of course also have to write the documentation. For most systems that I wrote I would guess that about 20% of my time was spent writing the documentation. I did the best job I could to write documentation, and my manager, who spent very little time reviewing my code, spent a great deal of his time reviewing my documentation. Documentation was important to him as well. He wanted everyone on his staff to be known for writing good documentation. But some of the users tended to be lazy. It was quicker for them to pick up the phone and call me and ask me how to do something than it was for them to open the manual (hard copy in those days) and find the answer themselves. With some users I had to get to the point where I would say, "The answer is on page xx in the documentation. Read that section, then if you have any questions give me a call back." Once they realized that they couldn't avoid cracking the cover of the documentation, they usually stopped calling. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
