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atoavtoday at 1:34 PM3 repliesview on HN

Well I once watched an sysadmin with 430 years of experience swear his way through an installation process. Until I, back then a intern, pointed out that maybe reading the install instructions would have been a good idea, since there were some steps in there that would have saved us some time. We scrapped everything and reinstalled following the instructions and 15 minuted later it worked.

I admit that I also often deviate from installation processes, but only when I really know why I want to do that. And I tend to read the instructions first.

But I know people who are snuggly proud about not reading the manual and I really don't get it.


Replies

rmunntoday at 2:52 PM

> But I know people who are snuggly proud about not reading the manual and I really don't get it.

Agreed... but there seem to be more and more products that either don't have manuals, or whose manuals are so badly written that reading them turns out to be a waste of time. I feel like people are being trained not to read manuals anymore, so I understand the people whose first instinct is "that thing is going to be useless, I'm not going to waste my time reading it". But not the ones who are proud of not reading manuals, that doesn't make sense to me either.

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rmunntoday at 2:49 PM

Was "430 years" a typo for "30 years" or for "43 years"?

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close04today at 2:04 PM

When all else fails, read the manual. It’s a tried and tested practice among experts worth their salt.

A lit of practices save you 10s each day but when they fail you lose 10 years’ worth of savings.