AIBU to think "Can't you find that out yourself" (Caution ranty)

[mirtzapine]

EG Type It In To Bloody Google.

Especially if they're using the internet.

I just read a thread here where someone asked a question about history and politics.

Why not just type the thread subject line into google/bing/duckduckgo/youtube/dogpile/wikipedia (whichever your preferred search engine is) and open some of the results and start to form an opinion. And then use that information to do deeper searches.

its not just here, in my professional capacity, the amount of IT staff (even the "Senior" ones), who don't know something and don't know even how to search for it.

Is it just plain laziness?

Is it a need to be spoonfed?

In the IT world there is stack exchange its a parent of a load of Q&A sites.

stackoverflow for programming, serverfault for system administration and superuser for user issues.

Any IT person worth their salt should use them, yet the amount of highly paid fuckwits I've encountered, who can't find the basics and expect an answer to be handed over.

Example.
Server Administrator of one of the top five Re-Insurance companies.

Me "Can you tell me the assigned IP address of xyz server?"
Him "Its a windows box, I dunno how to do that, I'm unix"
Me "Well its ifconfig on unix, windows its ipconfig"
Him "Oh! thats really similar"
Me "I didn't know we were running unix here? What flavour? Sun? Sco?"
Him "OH! we stopped being a unix house about 10 years ago and it was RHEL"
Me "Me Ten years ago? Haven't you been on a course, Read one of the Microsoft Press books or serverfaulted?"
I'm actually leafing through the Windows 2008 Server Admin books he has on his desk, while I'm saying that.
Him "Yeh! but I wasn't really interested serverfaulted whats that?
Me leaning over his keyboard typing in serverfault.com into his browser address bar. "That!".
Him, "oooh! that looks interesting I might bookmark that"
Me internally facepalming and thinking... no wonder finacial service firms get hacked all the time.

It often stuns me that people either can't RTFM or google the bloody answer.

I mean if the question was posed... what were your personal experiences of xyz historical event then I could understand wanting to mine the collective wisdom and experience of mumsnet.

Another example, What's Rhodesia?" is not the same as What's your experiences, feeling and opinions concerning Rhodesia_

Grrrr!!!! Gah!!!! Bloody Bloody . G-d!! I enjoyed that rant

There's nothing wrong with wanting to chat about a subject, or start a thread because you think other posters might have interesting or funny things to say about it. You don't always want or need someone to just say 'for fuck's sake, google it.'

Yes, in a work situation people can be very lazy. I'm often asked questions by people within my organisation, and the reply I give is usually quite simply a link to a page on our own website, because I've been bothered to look on there.

_ Him "Its a windows box, I dunno how to do that, I'm unix"
Me "Well its ifconfig on unix, windows its ipconfig"
Him "Oh! thats really similar" _

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about here, you might as well be speaking Russian. I'm afraid I would be one of those pesky people you'd eye roll at.

But to be fair, I think the bloke in the OP was working as a system admin, so ought to know more about IT than your average banana.

What bugs me is when people like journalists make elementary factual mistakes which they could easily avoid with 5 minutes on Google. I've seen entire lazy articles based on some long-disproved and totally erroneous factual premise (e.g. that there has ever been any council anywhere that has banned Christmas) (I'm looking at you, Richard Littlejohn), and the trouble is that that then perpetuates serious errors in the minds of thousands of readers. In fact, you get the distinct impression that some of them deliberately avoid fundamental fact-checking because they're worried that the real facts will show up their argument as totally without foundation and they'll have to think of something else to write about.

Oh right, I missed that. I have been far stupider with IT support people. I feel sorry for anyone who has to deal with me!

I got my arse handed to me on here once for suggesting that someone should maybe do their own reading about world events rather than sitting back and expecting other mumsnetters to patiently fill them in on several decades of political and social history. They'd started a thread titled "what's going on with North Korea, then?" or something similar. Right got on my tits.

CorusKate Possibly even earlier than the 1960's. Aldous huxley's, Brave New World makes reference to such a situation.

OK I can now see that I'm going to get quite a spanking.

my point was don't ask "What's Fukushima", try going more for the Fukushima, OMG, has anyone ever experienced a radioactive disaster like that... and people in Cumbria and the Scottish Lowlands will go Yeh! we're still being fucked by Chernobyl now... no-one wants our lamb or milk. And the Cumbrians will go Chernobyl... not just bloody Chernobyl what about the Winscale/Sellafield leak that fucked us as well.

Sorry treaclesoda, I agree with LadyBegleEyes for what its worth

This pisses me off so much (need to get out more obviously)

Just as much as posters who never come back to a thread after starting it. That gets on my wick!

I won't even start on the AIBU's that should be anywhere but in AIBU - there's a couple more topics you can choose from you know!

And breathe....

Sorry for hijack there.

But then, bubblegoose, you probably wouldn't have claimed to be an expert in unix servers in the first place (or have been hired as a Server Administrator). So the OP wouldn't have said that to you. So you wouldn't have been eye rolled at.

The OP went right over my head, something or other to do with IT I think.

Sometimes people want to interact with a human being, Google does not offer that. Years ago when Ask Jeeves was popular my mil asked me to ask him a question, she thought that he was a real person running a helpline internet service.

Icimoi piss poor data journalism is another thing I could rant about.

1/4 of my surveyed population (me, DW, 2DCs') don't like bananas, therefore we shouldn't buy bananas because a quater of the population think bananas are the spawn of Satan, and perpetuate a unfair plantation wages in the West Indies
75% of my survey do like bananas and as such we only buy fair trade bananas to bring about a fairer wage system.

I don't roll my eyes at people who have no experience of the example I stated, but as a Senior Systems Administrator on £75k per annum... he should have known a 101 thing like my example. And that was just one of the many daily WTF's that individual created.

Also I feel it should be corrected cos the * didn't embolden as I expected
i f config
i p config

let see if that worked.

I'm a librarian. People not knowing how (or wanting) to search for themselves (partly) keeps me in a job. I love to do a quick google for them in between the complicated stuff. Easy win.

Thank you non-googling people!

Yes that's true Debbie. Although I'm still scratching my head as to why the OP used THAT exchange as her example. I thought we were all supposed to 'get it'.

Plus it's a good teaching opportunity - watch me find out for you and maybe next time you can have a go yourself, the equivalent of your example person bookmarking the Q&A site (although clearly information literacy promotion isn't part of your job description, so I can see how it would be annoying).

TheArticFunky Amazon offers exactly that service... Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

I think it might be information overload which I suffer from or the fact that if I ask someone who I know will know the answer my brain can focus happily back on staring out of the window and thinking about clouds to which it is better suited.

CorusKate I just googled it... I'm just about to buy it from play books to download.

I know very little about IT, but I thought mirtzapine explained this specific issue pretty clearly.

It was basically an example about someone who got paid to do a job, but hadn't done any cpd in his field for ten years, and had no idea what was going on, wasn't it?

TillyTellTale spot on, it turned out that he had gone on courses, but none of it ever seemed to "stick". He also used that old trick of I'm a specialist in X, so can't answer for Y. Also If you asked him about X he'd then be a Specialist in Y so couldn't answer for X.

Hmm tricky.
If I want to know more about a subject, I google it. Google usually comes up with newspaper articles, wiki, etc and also a mumsnet discussion thread on the topic.
So I click on the MN link and read lots if people's opinions.
If the original person hadn't asked mn but had, googled it then there wouldn't be a thread for me to read.
In which case yabu.

However, someone asking me an address or date for example when they're sitting at a computer - yanbu!

I get people calling me at work and asking how to do things in Sharepoint especially, and I have been known to say 'Hang on while I google that for you...'

you get the distinct impression that some of them deliberately avoid fundamental fact-checking because they're worried that the real facts will show up their argument as totally without foundation and they'll have to think of something else to write about

Icimoi that is know amongst journalists as a story 'so good it must be true'.

Was just thinking this while I was on FB. One of the people in my news feed is constantly writing status updates like this: 'Anyone know where I can buy xyz?' Or 'Can anyone tell me where I can go to do y?'

Again it would be fine if she wanted personal reviews etc but she is asking stuff that you can just type into google. So pointless. I think it's some form of attention-seeking or laziness.