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from the if-manuals-are-for-sissies,-who-are-automatics-for? dept.
Lancelot Braithwaite cannot get through my visit without bursting forth a mantra that once served him and thousands of consumers well: “Read the frickin’ instruction manual!” he bellows. “And don’t throw it out unless you’re pretty good at memorizing it!” Never mind that products—from iPhones to Facebook—have made manuals into curious artifacts of a distant era. That era is alive if not well in Braithwaite’s smokey, cramped one-bedroom on West 14th Street.
Before tech product reviewers were brand names, there was Braithwaite, thundering his wisdom and geekery from publications that now exist only in yellowing copies. It was a time when the best critics were so familiar with technical specifications that their knowledge rivaled the engineers who built the products. And none were as omnipresent or as savvy as Braithwaite, who even served on industry standards committees.
Manuals are for sissies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tbuskey on Tuesday November 07 2017, @05:11PM (1 child)
I spent quite a bit of time on an Openstack installer and an installer for our product on that cloud. We'd send it to customers, our sales guys, our qa guys and they'd call me with question. They were in all time zones and often had to wait for my answers. The installer changed and improved quite a bit as a result.
I also worked with our tech writer to get a good manual to answer most of the questions we received. He also did the install to test the manual.
Invariably we'd get calls about installing on VMware, Xen or plain KVM and that "it doesn't work". Or they'd try to install onto a box that is woefully undersized. These issues were all answered in the start of the manual. There's a reason it doesn't work and why we specified requirements and wiring diagrams.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 07 2017, @11:58PM
I write documentation all day long (no, it's not my job, but it makes my job so much easier when we [inevitably] circle back to the SSDD). My colleagues ask me questions in e-mail, I send them links to the documentation. Doesn't stop them from asking the questions, but it does save me from repeating myself endlessly.
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