> 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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
Just giving them AI back is pointless. It means _your_ role is pointless.
My favorite phrase on that team was "What have you tried so far?"
Maybe I’m just more generous with my time than others (or perhaps I don’t value it), but all these responses saying friends and colleagues asking you questions they could’ve theoretically looked up are “wasting your time” are rather perplexing. If somebody’s asking me, like you said, I generally assume they have a reason for asking. Or maybe they’re just tired and don’t want to spend an hour looking it up and verifying it because they know I have a quick answer that takes me little to no effort. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I get asked camera questions all the time, and frankly I just see those as opportunities to stay sharp. No better way to learn/reinforce your knowledge than teaching others
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.
"I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
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.
But if you just ask them the question and don't tell them what you've found or where you got stuck, you're asking them to stop doing what they're doing and spend all that same time you just spent working on your problem.
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?"
Usually because the question is very easily answered with a quick web search.
