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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
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.
That's a very smart way to go about it, and way more positive!
You don't even need to upgrade to try this new code! Just type...
That way you teach them that
They are beginner devs, so they should learn to understand how things work.
RTFHC (Run The Fucking Help Command)
I'il use that XD
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
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
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.
Help list you all commands, community give you the link of discord
types community, presses enter and immediately ask a silly question without reading help first
i'm a classicaly trained IT guy, I still call them "Layer 8 issue"
I don't work on networking but I'll be adopting this from now on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8
The good old ID-10-T error
Unfortunately some users are just about bright enough to work that one out.
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.
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
Some things require skill to operate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the first part:
That's why you need and have to be aware of a target group.
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.
To the last sentence: Never said so. But yes, it's a start.
Who spends their day "browsing around GitHub"?
You have to have a skill issue before you can have a skill. No shame in it.
Open source is free, but empathy is still a good feature.
Better than PEBKAC.
Pee Easy Bro, Kangaroos Aren't Coming
Propogation of Errors by Bleak Knowledge About Coding
AKA PICNIC
Alarum, Koalas Above!
Please Invert Canopy Now In Case
Good idea.
I shall have to add a "skill issue" label to my git repos.
Hmm, I'll steal this for my repo
