Thursday, October 06, 2005

Why Can't People Follow Instructions / Think

We upgraded a library yesterday, so it requires each developer on the team to follow a couple of steps to get their environment up to date with the latest changes. Inevitably two of the people I would fire (if it were up to me) send emails that the changes don't work for them. In addition, the body of the email is basically, "It didn't work on my box." No information about how they tried hard to solve the problem themselves OR any useful information like a log snippet.

I decided that I didn't feel like helping them any time soon. Someone else stepped in and said, "You need to do get the latest from source control." Then the person sends an email saying that fixed it, followed by another saying, "Oh wait. No it didn't." Then another saying they did a "full update" and that that finally did fix it. Why, oh why, can't people a) use some common sense and debug a problem themselves, b) provide adequate information to get the help that they "need", or c) actually follow the instructions for the fucking solution. The whole email exchange took 11 whole minutes. After the first email, who doesn't spend more than 11 minutes trying to determine if they're being an idiot (except of course an idiot).

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