I'm a developer. One of my coworkers asks me a question the moment anything goes wrong, or he doesn't understand something, in either our code or even third party code we use.
He's a nice enough guy, and I'm always friendly and courteous and make time to answer questions. I don't think he realizes how annoyed it makes me that he doesn't RTFM and how much time he takes out of my day. I don't want to sour our working relationship, and he's been in computing a couple decades at this point so I doubt he'll change his habits. I get the feeling he knows he shouldn't be asking, because he doesn't ask the stupid questions on public channels.
Way I see it, there are three options:
- Passive: if he asks a question he can easily answer himself with 5-10 minutes of research (like how to clone a git repo), just don't answer and hope I get fewer of that type of question
- Active: go over a couple instances with him where he asked me questions that I'm certain he could have easily answered himself, and impress upon him that I can't constantly be answering those questions
- Serious: Talk to my manager about it.
Because I prefer to avoid confrontation with the people I work alongside, and frankly it's not my job to teach him to google, I've decided to start with (1), and if he doesn't get the message and I keep getting questions go to (3).
So my question... Are there any courses of action I haven't considered? Anything that the community would recommend?
More detailed explanation
I'm currently working in a role with a significant development component (SRE; hiring me was part of the transition from more traditional ops to an SRE model). One of my coworkers- who does have a CS background, but has only worked in sysadmin-type jobs afaict- is constantly deferring to me with questions about our codebase. Which is fine, insofar as I'm one of the few people on the team who's either read or written most of it.
What's less fine is that asking me is his immediate response when anything goes even mildly wrong, or when he doesn't understand something. Even if I send him the link for a wiki page I've written, he'll ignore the wiki page and force me to manually go over the steps or feed them to him one-at-a-time.
You could argue "maybe my wiki pages aren't particularly clear", which I suppose is possible (although I put a lot of effort into making them unambiguous, practical, comprehensive, concise, and grammatical), but he even defers to me immediately about really simple stuff with tools we didn't write (like git
or sqlite
).
For example, he knows SQL, and I gave him a tool that generates a SQLite database at one point. Along with the wiki page on the tool, which gives information on how to use the tools, as well as a little information on the SQLite database that it spits out. It was a really simple database. Like three tables. That's it. There weren't even foreign keys. And he didn't bother to run .help
or look up documentation for SQLite. Didn't even bother to read the wiki page, that had the commands he'd need to run in it. I literally copy-pasted those commands for him.