alt Hacker NewsLMGTFY is an ironic jab, not a suggestion.
> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first
It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.
But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
Replies
>> what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Because everyone has had that person who you help out, and become their path of least resistance to an answer. They are not looking for the BEST or a GOOD answer, just the least effort. It's completely reasonable to push back with "what have you tried so far?"
I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.
Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.
And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Usually because the question is very easily answered with a quick web search.
Then we should create LMGPTTFY, then it's at least apparent and the recipient needn't click.
But this is often simply not the case - people will often ask for trivial things trivially found on Google.
If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood.
If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.