My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to Know About Everything series. In stores now."
I've also noticed there's this phenomenon I'll call Reverse India Off-Shoring:
1. western companies hire Indian engineers off-shore because they're cheaper and yet equivalent, supposedly
2. online forums flooded with barely readable questions by folks with Indian names where the thing being asked about is so simple and basic that it basically amounts to "would someone please do my job for me? k thx." How do I print a string. How do I write data to disk. How do I install Apache. Etc. That level of question.
I've seen that 100's of times in the last few years. It's alternatingly both funny and infuriating.
And of course the flip side of that point is a lot of people's questions ARE already answered somewhere, often in books, if somebody just cared to get off their a-- and go look for it, spend time reading and investing in their own education. I've seen thousands of questions asked on the Internet where the asker could have answered it themselves by putting in a little more common sense effort, upfront.
True enough, but with the number of technologies a developer is "required" to know these days, I have a bit of trouble buying the RTFM argument (unless it is referring to freely available, easily searchable help docs on the vendor/author website). The the amount of technologies I use on a day to day basis, it's literally impossible for me to RTFM on all of them, especially if by RTFM you mean read a book on the technology (not to mention, which book should I read....figuring that out can take an hour. And is reading just one book sufficient?)
The Stack Overflow goal is to build the "FM" in a search-friendly way that speaks directly to specific questions.
For myself, I like the site, and sometimes have problems it helps with, but too seldom for it to become a go-to resource. I think there are lots of people in situations for whom it can be indispensable in that way, though.
