Especially in my early days venturing into Python (with which I am still only casually acquainted), I’d google a problem and end up on an SO question outlining my exact problem, only see “closed as duplicate” or a bunch of snarky comments about how the questioner didn’t RTFM or whatever.
Why do they hate people asking questions on this site specifically about asking questions? Part of being a noob is not just about not knowing the bare facts of a thing, but not knowing where to look for answers or even what to ask.
While I’m on this soapbox, I hate it when people say “just google it.” because most of the time I see that phrase it’s because that forum post is the first google result.
And sometimes it’s impossible to google something if you don’t know the correct keywords to find what you are looking for.
Yes. I tell people that IT isn’t about knowing the answer right away, it’s about knowing which questions to ask, where to ask those questions, and how to interpret the results. These skills are in no way obvious if you aren’t familiar with the system you’re working with.
Problem is that more experienced folks forget that they were noobs once, too, and there was a time they didn’t know what ARP was, let alone that not sending ARP response packets could cause a device to stop communicating.
Another thing about seasoned professionals - they have top-down and bottom-up knowledge of how their product works. They can discard a lot of superfluous information out of hand, which allows them to narrow the scope very quickly.
So when a newb is parsing an error log, they look at any and all related errors. 90% of their mental capacity is being used to judge each entry, asking themselves “Is this thing relevant to the problem?” Chasing red herrings.
Meanwhile, the senior engineer can glance over and see the 100 lines of network errors are just an uncaught exception from a deprecated module because a line of code never got commented out. Or some such shit.