RTFM - The Single Most Important Bit Of Advice for Engineers

I've been a software engineer for almost 8 years, and I'm sure I haven't always been a great one. But in the last couple of years, I've noticed a significant change in my ability to understand complex systems. It's not that I became a genius or that I learned some obscure advanced concepts. The change was much more subtle: I started to read the manual.

"Read the manual" aka RTFM, this piece of advice accelerated my growth as a software engineer. Very simple advice, with a lot of wisdom behind it. By nature, a lot of engineers like to tinker and rely on their trial and error techniques to get the job done. The uglier term for that is brute-forcing your way through a problem. I'm guilty of still doing this from time to time.

When I worked for Paymentus, I got a lot of chances to work with the SVP Technology, Eugene Abramov. This man was a walking encyclopedia for us. We would shoot questions at him while he walked by, and he would quote the manual, pinpointing where we had to look as if he had read it just before sleeping that day.

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