The satisfaction/get rekt feeling when I do this.

When a client sends an email asking us to do something "ASAP" and end it with "thanks in advance!" while it's something that we have user guides for.

"Dear {client.name},

I'd like to point you to a tutorial we have about this on our online help desk: {tutorial.link}.

Have a great day!"

Ha, rekt!

@Condor We offer help if they can't figure it out but damn if you can't figure it out from those tutorials, you need some special education.

@Condor ++ for spoonfed 👍🏼🥄

Oh gods haha

My boss messaged me day before yesterday saying it was urgent that I call him. I didn't see it for 20 minutes. When I called him, he said I needed to join an appear.in video conference, which I did.

Turns out that he, the "brand manager," and another sales person (They're all sales people) couldn't figure out how to configure a printer using my step-by-step doc.

The doc literally tells you where to click, what to copy, where to paste it, why you're pasting it, etc. I formatted it so all the important text (actions) are bold and black while everything else is normal and light gray. It's the simplest thing to follow, ever.

Their hangup, and why the doc was "horribly outdated and impossible to follow"? Well, API Guy had redesigned the data page so everything was much clearer and matched *exactly* what the printer asked for, even with duplicates and "old password, new password, confirm password" where that would make it clearer. He also indicated what sections of the printer config the data was for. In particular, he renamed one of the bits of data from "Application Key" to "ID", since that's what the printer asks for.

These three people, working together for over half an hour, couldn't figure out that "Server Direct Print -- ID" needed to go into the "ID" field of the "Server Direct Print" config page.

I had to promise that I would "make sure the doc was fully up-to-date" and show the brand manager how to configure a printer again, despite him having configured about 40 on his own so far.

The moral?
Don't expect independent thought from people. It's quite rare.

@Root nice experience and thought u shared there. Most of the time we developer just set a high standard on users expecting them to be at a certain level

@IndoDev I assume everyone is an idiot and start from there. 😄😧

@Root all developers should do that too. Maybe at least make a section for idiot lol

Interesting. There are differing schools of thoughts on this though. You have @linuxxx types who just crap on their users for various and honestly understandable reasons. On the other end, you have the folks at 37signals - now basecamp - who’d do things for their users. They went to great pain to make their software as simple as possible. But if a customer wants help importing their stuff, they’ll take word, excel documents etc and just do it for them. They are well loved by everybody as a result.

Always remember that Software sucks. It’s just a means to an end. Your goal as a business is to help your customers reach their end goal. The painless you make it, the better for everyone

@windlessuser Uhm, before you put me OUTSIDE of the category of people who help their customers with importing stuffs etc, I do that on a daily basis as well.

As I said in an earlier comment, if a user is lost/really doesn't understand/fucks something up, I'm happy to help.

We have a ticket system. You dont send one you don't get help. You come into the office and ask directly for the help.... You get the "have you sent a ticket? No? Send a ticket" speech. You'd think people would listen after you say it enough times...

@Root I assume People are smart enough and start from there.. then i end up explaining stuff to the equivalent to a smart 2 year old.

Most of the time I just talk high level so people jus agrees with me in fear of admitting they are dumb, it works for the little stuff :)

@mundo03 Whenever I talk, especially high-level, people totally can't follow, and thus I end up explaining every little thing in excruciating detail. And they still get lost and confused, and blame me for it.

Talking to people is bloody infuriating.

@Root the trick is not caring, if they don't care enough to ask, don't waste your time explaining.

But i get what you are saying :D

Everytime a client asked me to do something super simple that we had provided guides for, I took 2 minutes to do it and invoiced them for 1 hour of work.

@Condor Those are quite high expectations...

@Python as you should do.