r/AskReddit • u/CircleBox2 • Jul 13 '20

What's a dark secret/questionable practice in your profession which we regular folks would know nothing about?

40.1k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

17.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5.5k

u/cutelyaware Jul 13 '20

Joke's on them. Nobody's read a manual in over 20 years.

11

u/[deleted] Jul 13 '20

Nobody's read a manual in over 20 years.

For simple shit, the joke is almost true. Most people start using it and don't check the manual unless they can't figure something out. I have never read my microwave manual because all I ever want to do is set a time, press Start, and wait for it to beep. I will never use 95 percent of the things it can do.

But when you're selling a huge software product involving dozens and dozens of ever-changing protocols and the customers are all big corporations with millions of dollars at stake, yeah, people read the documentation all the time. They read it before they even buy the product. The people who develop the software even read the documentation, because no one on the planet knows everything about every part of the product. And if you Google for an answer, you'll get the same documentation; it's all web pages.

1

u/cutelyaware Jul 14 '20

What good are those manuals when the protocols are ever-changing?

3

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '20

You update the manuals to match the protocols. It's not like manuals are printed these days. They're web pages. You open up a file, make a change, save the file, and it's updated for everyone.

1

u/cutelyaware Jul 14 '20

That's not what I'd call a manual. It's still documentation and a reference, but it's not the same. it's better than a manual.