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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?

#101

Post by masklinn »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #98
masklinn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have NEVER gotten that bug report. That's interesting, at my job we almost get these: we tend to dump tracebacks to the user, and it's common for them to screenshot the traceback (despite the "copy this error" button). Maybe you should have some sort of inline reporting interface à la Apple where the user can tell you what they were doing and provide contact info?

I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility. I also get a lot of near-misses, where they almost get it right: for example, copying the bit that says "there was an error, please include the information below when you report it" without actually copying the stack trace…

> I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility.

Yes I forgot to write that part in: while we rarely get the "screenshot pasted in word" (which IIRC stores the full image by default so you may be able to recover it, yay) the screenshotted traceback is usually cut off at the bottom, so we get the least useful part (wow I get the stack information of the WSGI handler, well that's going to be helpful) but commonly don't get the actually interesting part.

> It doesn't help matters that some of the software I inherited uses this antipattern: […]

Fuck everything about that with a rusty bonesaw.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#102

Post by jwilk »

js2 wrote: post #43
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…

Nothing new under the Sun. When I was getting my C.S. degree in the mid-90's I worked at the same time for the C.S. department as an SA. (Actually, they called us sysops at the time.) Anyway, I saw all the help requests that came in from students and faculty. These are C.S. students and faculty mind you. It seemed the further along someone was in their C.S. education the worse the help requests would get. My favorite…

"do the needful" is en-IN-ism:

http://travel.cnn.com/mumbai/life/10-indianisms-652344/

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#103

Post by jaclaz »

But I guess that somewhere a line must be drawn, there is a difference between a "common user" and a "software engineer", and as well some differences between people that try to help strangers on "third party" issues for free and a developer supporting his/her (paying) customers or debugging his/her company internal issues.

A good page about the proper way to ask questions/reporting problems on the internet is (was) here (among many other good FGA's), to avoid the common "I'm ill, doctor. Help!" effect:

https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160520121511/http://homep...

https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160604095422/http://homep...

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#104

Post by khedoros1 »

mfukar wrote: post #66
grkvlt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It gives me hope for a solution, since then I've got some text strings to throw at google. Otherwise, I'm back to starting with "$program_name crash", because I don't want to use search terms that would exclude someone's wording describing the same problem.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#105

Post by khedoros1 »

stevekemp wrote: post #96
arjie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Indeed I had a discussion on reddit recently, trying to help somebody. Their exact words; "It should take somebody 20 minutes to fix this if they know python" At that point I was done with the conversation, though I was tempted to ask what their bug-fixing-budget was..

When someone asks me to provide them a fixed version of their code, that's when their problem completely stops being my problem (unless there's something unusually interesting about the code, maybe).

What bothers me is if someone starts acting like they're entitled to my help and time. What bothers me more is when they act like they're entitled to a complete solution, rather than hints, explanations, and recommendations. No, I'm not going to code your homework assignment for you, sorry.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#106

Post by Markoff »

arcosdev wrote: post #41
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…

I get bug reports like that from our QA team! The people whose specialized job it is to report bugs write one line bug reports like " doesn't work". No stack traces, no environment information, no steps to reproduce.

are they hiring? :-) can't imagine those QA people are not fired, I always at least try to provide steps to reproduce and expected result if possible, and of course it should be accompanied by some system log

there seem to be some serious issue with your QA training. soon I will be looking for job in QA, I can only hope there are more companies like yours giving me better chances :)

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#107

Post by Markoff »

lloeki wrote: post #84
js2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing new under the Sun. When I was getting my C.S. degree in the mid-90's I worked at the same time for the C.S. department as an SA. (Actually, they called us sysops at the time.) Anyway, I saw all the help requests that came in from students and faculty. These are C.S. students and faculty mind you. It seemed the further along someone was in their C.S. education the worse the help requests would get. My favorite…

> certain nationality Sounds like a word to word translation from french "Merci de faire le nécessaire".

could be also any slavic language, they use it in same way

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#108

Post by meej »

tambourine_man wrote: post #18
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…

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…

Writing good bug reports is a skill that is, in my experience, only taught to software testers, and even then only informally. My first job out of college was Software Test Engineer (STE) at a large software company that was plenty mature enough to have formal training around these things, and yet during my first week on the job my mentor instructed me to query the bug reporting system for bugs written by particular STEs on our team because they were known to write well-structured, quality reports. This was not a terrible way to learn how to write a good bug report -- I learned a lot from this exercise -- but it's not exactly a good way to evenly distribute such knowledge across entire teams or companies.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#109

Post by meej »

dragonwriter wrote: post #23
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…

Actually, doctors are trained to ask questions to elicit specific descriptions of symptoms precisely because people all the time do pretty much what you say they never do.

Similarly, reference librarians receive reference interview training to get a better idea of what information patrons are seeking. There were several MDs in my LIS cohort who remarked on the similarity between reference interviewing and medical interviewing.

Contrast this with tech, where users are treated like idiots and the first question asked in a tech support interaction is the cliched "have you turned it off and on again" joke. Maybe we need to approach this more like the doctors and librarians do.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#110

Post by InclinedPlane »

clusmore wrote: post #72
InclinedPlane wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bahahaha, no, that's exactly the problem doctors have. "House", for all its theatrics, does get a few things right. People are bad when it comes to their health, which is compounded by medical/physiological ignorance. You'd be surprised what people know, what they're willing to tolerate and rationalize, what they're willing to discount, what they're willing to convince themselves of. A common pattern in tech and medi…

See also, the XY problem. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x...

Ah, it has a name, nice.

Also, this is very, very closely related to "satisficing", which is worth understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

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