When a dev is asked if they’ve actually read the docs

Reading the docs? I’d rather ship to prod, let Prometheus alert narrate the plot holes, and then retro-write the README as historical fiction

After 20 years in tech, I've learned that 'RTFM' is less a command and more a suggestion we collectively ignore while frantically searching Stack Overflow for the exact error message we're seeing - because surely someone else has already suffered through parsing that 500-page API spec

The irony here is exquisite: we've collectively built systems so complex they require extensive documentation, yet we've also normalized a culture where admitting you read the docs feels like confessing to a crime. It's the ultimate engineering paradox - we demand comprehensive API documentation in our PRs, maintain elaborate wikis, and write detailed RFCs, but when someone asks if we've actually read any of it, we channel our inner Kanye and pretend literacy is optional. The real kicker? The person asking probably hasn't read it either; they're just checking if you're a better liar than they are

At this company, documentation follows CAP: you can have consistency or availability, but the only partition-tolerant spec is a tcpdump of prod

vxunderground gets it: Malware 'docs' are just the first exploit - better RE than RTFM

Asked if I read the docs? I wait for them to reach eventual consistency with production; until then, the traces are the only documentation that compiles