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Why Won't You Answer My Question?

rion.io

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Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#61

Post by lostlogin »

scintill76 wrote: post #34
drblast wrote: post #9

Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose. I'm constantly baffled by bug reports I receive. From other people who work at my company. A tech company. A large one. You've heard of it. We log every operation in our API. I cache errors, and the API returns a JSON formatted error with a GUID that correlates to the operation that failed, so if I have a GUID I can look at exactly what happened every ste…

Ah, I love "weird errors." I'm not sure there's any other adjective that's ever used, they're always weird .

Your workplace is much more polite than my ones have been. Dropping the odd F-bomb equated to a low level error, with appropriate scaling from there.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#62

Post by [deleted] »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #30
squidfood wrote: post #17

A variant of rubber-duck debugging: Ask the question and hit Send. Invariably, no matter how long I've thought about it, the obvious answer will occur to me minutes (or seconds) after I've embarrassed myself my asking. (is there a term for this?)

L'esprit de l'escalier debugging?

[deleted]

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#63

Post by dasil003 »

emmelaich wrote: post #51
adekok wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those points are polite. If people get resentful when you ask for data, the solution is to have a discussion about their poor attitude. Most large companies I've been at are terrible at this. They want "professionalism", which tends to mean "superficially polite, even if the questions are utterly retarded". They don't like "unprofessional" behavior, which tends to mean "you got frustrated that someone else wasn't doi…

> Those points are polite. I know what you mean and I agree but unfortunately most people don't.

Mm, I've never had a problem asking those 3 questions of any non-technical person that comes to me for help. Whether it's perceived as polite or not is entirely contained in the tone. You can say that exact terse statements very politely or very rudely or anywhere in between.

I'm somewhat privileged to have had a 20 year career in mostly competent workplaces, and I understand that in some places where engineers are held in low regard that you might get a lot of "stop asking questions and fix the damn problem already", but it never hurts to cultivate a pleasant disposition in the workplace.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#64

Post by parallel »

squidfood wrote: post #17

A variant of rubber-duck debugging: Ask the question and hit Send. Invariably, no matter how long I've thought about it, the obvious answer will occur to me minutes (or seconds) after I've embarrassed myself my asking. (is there a term for this?)

I find this also happens when playing chess. I don't fully consider the implications of a move until I've just made it.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#65

Post by hvidgaard »

grkvlt wrote: post #52
tambourine_man wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god yes. I don't understand why it's so hard for people to report a bug. I don't think other fields suffer from this as much. No one goes to the doctor and says: - I don't feel good - What are your symptoms? - I don't know, I just feel bad. It's usually in the form of: "I have a sore throats and running a fever, it began x days ago", etc What is it about computers that makes people throw their hands in air and say…

One thing that is also frustrating is apparently intelligent people (even software engineers, while writing code) who see a stack trace and their mind goes blank. They then send you an error report saying 'I set X to 4 in my code and got this exception, here is the stack trace - what's wrong, and how do I fix it?' followed by something like: WrongNumberException: Please use the number three instead of four when setti…

If only all error messages would be that helpful, dev work would be significantly simpler. Instead I rely on the source, or decompilers to figure out why shit doesn't work.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#66

Post by mfukar »

grkvlt wrote: post #52
tambourine_man wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god yes. I don't understand why it's so hard for people to report a bug. I don't think other fields suffer from this as much. No one goes to the doctor and says: - I don't feel good - What are your symptoms? - I don't know, I just feel bad. It's usually in the form of: "I have a sore throats and running a fever, it began x days ago", etc What is it about computers that makes people throw their hands in air and say…

One thing that is also frustrating is apparently intelligent people (even software engineers, while writing code) who see a stack trace and their mind goes blank. They then send you an error report saying 'I set X to 4 in my code and got this exception, here is the stack trace - what's wrong, and how do I fix it?' followed by something like: WrongNumberException: Please use the number three instead of four when setti…

Not to exclude the X factor, but presentation matters. I think vomiting exceptions, stack traces, or error codes in text makes people not care. Not just a layman, but an expert, too.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#67

Post by lloeki »

drblast wrote: post #9

Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose. I'm constantly baffled by bug reports I receive. From other people who work at my company. A tech company. A large one. You've heard of it. We log every operation in our API. I cache errors, and the API returns a JSON formatted error with a GUID that correlates to the operation that failed, so if I have a GUID I can look at exactly what happened every ste…

> Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose

This battle is indeed being fought since forever [0], of which this blog post is basically the nth dupe of.

[0]: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#68

Post by arjie »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #50
drblast wrote: post #9

Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose. I'm constantly baffled by bug reports I receive. From other people who work at my company. A tech company. A large one. You've heard of it. We log every operation in our API. I cache errors, and the API returns a JSON formatted error with a GUID that correlates to the operation that failed, so if I have a GUID I can look at exactly what happened every ste…

Hah. You think most techies want to get informative error reporting from their users? This is the email I sent to my hosting company a couple of years ago when WHM (a component of cPanel) started doing something silly that broke my SSHD: sshd and ip whitelisting - there's a bug it seems If I go to whitelist my current ip in whm, it asks me to restart sshd to make the changes stick. If I do that, sshd fails to restart…

"Should be easy" is a bozo bit phrase. Whether it should be that way or not, you're going into the slow bucket at that point.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#69

Post by Noughmad »

tambourine_man wrote: post #24
aetherson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father is a doctor. I assure you, you are overestimating the ability of (some) people to report specific symptoms.

It may very well be that I'm biased since it's my field. But what looks like the exception in other areas seems to be the rule in IT.

I don't know, I'm sure mechanics deal with a lot of "my car has a strange sound". Or people not admiting that there's anything wrong with it. It's probably more that there aren't many things except computers and cars which are both ubiquitous and breakable.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#70

Post by boondaburrah »

Noughmad wrote: post #69
tambourine_man wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may very well be that I'm biased since it's my field. But what looks like the exception in other areas seems to be the rule in IT.

I don't know, I'm sure mechanics deal with a lot of "my car has a strange sound". Or people not admiting that there's anything wrong with it. It's probably more that there aren't many things except computers and cars which are both ubiquitous and breakable.

Not enough people grew up listening to Car Talk on NPR.
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