LMGTFY 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. :-)

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randallsquared 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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geerlingguy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself".

They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.

	▲	bavell 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times. Agreed, and I do the same. They still get a courteous reply, but they also feel a little "pain" when they don't get a timely answer - an effective teacher.

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dust-jacket 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But as a good manager, you should throw it back: "what do you think?" "what have you tried so far?" etc.

Just giving them AI back is pointless. It means _your_ role is pointless.

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rpdillon 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed - I had a team that called this "remote brain execution" (we were a build team that used Bazel, and often fielded questions about why someone's build broke).

My favorite phrase on that team was "What have you tried so far?"

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jliptzin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Not just the workforce, my parents still barely know how to use a computer because any time they hit the slightest snag, they immediately call me for help.

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saalweachter 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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vidarh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But this is often simply not the case - people will often ask for trivial things trivially found on Google.

	▲	js8 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		IME it usually means they have some good reason to ask, which you are not aware of. For example, people might believe you are an expert or can give a better answer in the context.

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irishcoffee 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	js8 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise. "I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.