yes - this is what people are doing in my workplace, unfortunately. you can write the most concise and effective documentation possible for a feature of some complexity, and people will still be asking their chatbot to make a soundbite out of it. it's infuriating.
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
Give subjects a chopstick for each hand and say you have to hold one end and type with the other, and then test recall/understanding? That could be interesting
"What you want to get better at" can turn into "what they can do for you", though. Like if a conference or training course would help you start or improve on your goal, and they can approve you to get it paid for.
