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Subject:RE: Take this engineer and shove it From:John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"Rock, Megan" <Megan -dot- Rock -at- fanucrobotics -dot- com>, "'TECHWR-L'" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 25 May 2000 10:26:04 -0700 (PDT)
I was a little brief in my previous response. Let me try to
remedy that.
First, I'd like to ammend the saying "No such thing as a stupid
question." to "No such thing as a stupid question...only the
stupid people that ask them."
Here's my thought.
Yes, we ask questions because we don't know the answer. However,
those of us that don't want to look like morons will have done
everything in our power to figure out the answer first. So, even
though we haven't figured out the answer, we still know more
than we did before we started.
Therefore, we don't go them with the question "How does this
work.", but with the approach that the answer is not evident
from the process and not that we simply don't know the answer.
The eng., or dev. should start to question that the process
itself might be flawed...not our brain.
Go to an engineer or developer and let the person see that we
tried to figure it out and I promise you...you will never be
thought as as simplistic.
> I think all of us a technical writers take time to think about
> what we want
> to ask and try to form a clear, straightforward question to
> ask. But
Think so? How many time does someone dash out the question "How
do I find such and such sample document [becuase I'm too lazy or
inexperienced to know myself]" when 3 minutes with a search
engine gives you thousands of samples. I'm continualy dinged by
people on this site because instead of just dashing out an
answer, I usualy respond in a sarcastic manner...just like an
enginner would. I had one person from this list call me a pr**k
in private because he insisted that a site didn't have what he
wanted and dared me to find it on the site. It took me 8 minutes
to find it and I still haven't heard back from him.
> sometimes the engineers are still of the opinion that a) we
> should already
> know the answer, b) we should know all of the company's
> products inside and
> out so nothing should ever need to be explained to us, or c)
I've never seen this and I've worked with some really smart-a**
developers. All they want it to see that you tried your brain
before useing theirs.
=====
John Posada
jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com
john -at- tdandw -dot- com
732-291-7811
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Benjamin Franklin
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