The Bliss of Good Docs vs. the Pain of Unhelpful Advice

Description

This is the 'Two Guys on a Bus' meme format. On the left, a character sits in the shadowed side of the bus, looking miserable. A caption points to him, reading 'the "the docs" guy'. On the right, another character sits on the sunny side, smiling as he looks out at a beautiful landscape. His caption reads 'the docs'. The meme contrasts the experience of having clear, useful documentation with the frustrating experience of being told to 'read the docs' by someone who is unhelpfully cheerful and detached from the actual problem. The joke critiques a common and often frustrating dynamic in developer communities. While documentation is essential, it can be incomplete, outdated, or poorly written. The phrase 'read the docs' is sometimes used dismissively to shut down a request for help. The meme captures the despair of a developer who is not only stuck on a problem but is also receiving unhelpful, generic advice from a colleague who seems oblivious to the struggle (and the poor quality of the documentation itself)

Common Tags

Documentation DeveloperHumor DocumentationWoes DeveloperFrustration DeveloperPainPoints RelatableDevExperience CodingHumor

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Good documentation is like a well-factored API: it gives you exactly what you need. Bad documentation is a REST endpoint that just returns '418 I'm a teapot' for every request

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Good documentation is like a well-factored API: it gives you exactly what you need. Bad documentation is a REST endpoint that just returns '418 I'm a teapot' for every request
Anonymous

Opening the auto-generated Swagger for our 7-year-old “legacy microservice” feels like peering at a Minecraft enchanting table - pure glyphs, and you still need 30 XP of tribal knowledge before you can cast a single curl
Anonymous

After 20 years in the industry, I've learned that documentation doesn't prevent legacy code - it just provides archaeological evidence of exactly when and why someone decided that 'temp_final_v2_REAL' was a perfectly reasonable variable name
Anonymous

This perfectly captures the inverse relationship between documentation quantity and quality in legacy codebases. You start with 'HELLO I'M A FUNCTION' - clear, self-documenting code from an optimistic junior. Fast forward through a few refactors, and you're left with 36 instances of 'HELLO' scattered across the codebase like archaeological artifacts, each one more cryptic than the last. The real kicker? The original author left three years ago, the function now handles authentication, and that 'HELLO' comment is the only clue you have before the 3 AM production incident. At least Minecraft lets you stack items logically
Anonymous

Mojibake docs: the only time you'd rather debug production fires than decode the README
Anonymous

If the docs look like the Minecraft enchantment table, stop chanting and start tracing - write a failing integration test and let the packets explain the API
Anonymous

Enterprise SDK docs are the enchantment table of software: choose your cost - 7 minutes guessing params, 18 broken links, or 30 pages of auto‑generated Swagger where every field is string and the required x-api-version header is never mentioned
@sylfn 2y

my own lmao
@qwnick 2y

Sauce?
@Algoinde 2y

Any Google-developed library, service, API or repository
@Araalith 2y

Typical open-source.
@Araalith 2y

After a solid decade navigating the complex realms of Gentoo, I genuinely thought I'd seen it all. But then I encountered the pulse-audio configuration. All I wanted was to mix some game and microphone audio. But it was a journey through a maze of incomprehensible inhuman chaos that tested the very limits of my patience and skill.
1. @RiedleroD 2y
  
  and so they made pipewire
  
  @CcxCZ 2y
  
  Still way too baroque for my tastes. I'm pretty hapy with sndio (Linux port from OpenBSD) so far. If I'll ever need full multimedia thing I'll probably go for Arcan instead. Hell, I'll probably go for Arcan anyway eventually.
  
  @RiedleroD 2y
  
  wth do you mean by baroque
  
  @CcxCZ 2y
  
  Convoluted. It tries to be a better implementation than PA but it keeps practically all of the API.
  
  @RiedleroD 2y
  
  well… kinda? there's a compatibility layer that translates pulse API to pw API, and it's far from a perfect emulation. It's like wine in that sense
  
  @RiedleroD 2y
  
  the upside of that though is that pulse has horrible perf and pw has near-jack perf
2. @CcxCZ 2y
  
  Ha yup, and everyone who had a two bits of sense (sadly not many) told Lennart to fuck off right then. And it got worse with each following thing, culminating in polkit which drags along three quarters of Chrome to evaluate configuration in JavaScript.
@callofvoid0 2y

are these java versions ?
1. @Alienatick 2y
  
  Actually no, Gentoo is like Void but compile based, Pulseaudio is just an audio driver
  
  @endisn16h 2y
  
  fuj no its not
  
  @Alienatick 2y
  
  What is void and what is Gentoo?
  
  @endisn16h 2y
  
  wym?
  
  @Alienatick 2y
  
  They're both Linux😂😂
@dosse91 2y

Mesa
@BoxCollider2D 2y

It literally says: •1 wet elemental wet other •2 other embiggen berata •3 of free demon
1. @callofvoid0 2y
  
  which language ?
  
  @endisn16h 2y
  
  enchantment table
@BoxCollider2D 2y

It's English, but with SGA (Standard Galactic Alphabet)

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The Bliss of Good Docs vs. the Pain of Unhelpful Advice

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Comments

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