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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?

#21

Post by aetherson »

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…

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

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#23

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

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.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#24

Post by tambourine_man »

aetherson wrote: post #21
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…

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.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#25

Post by [deleted] »

CM30 wrote: post #3

Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here. Some service where you can actually pay money up front to guarantee an answer to your question, regardless of how it's worded and expect it done within a short time frame. Kind of like the Stack Exchange sites, except for people with more money than patience. Practically speaking though, my advice for people stuck on something like this is (in addition to doing some act…

[deleted]

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#26

Post by iceberg »

I used to do a lot of searching the Internet for a solution to a problem I ran into while coding and then I ended up having a bunch of web-links to fixes I didn't write. I got annoyed with myself about this.

Instead of searching the Internet I started really get to know the API and libraries of the languages I used and I got good books on the topics of software I develop. I slowly moved away from searching the Internet for a solution to using the books and delved into the language API. I now feel I've a deeper knowledge of the languages I work with and the techniques used to solve problems in my field.

Now when time is against me and I need a quick answer to a problem I search the Internet for an existing answer.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#27

Post by csours »

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'm sure there's a name for this phenomenon, but every field is like this.

It looks easy and clear-cut to you, because you know what is going on.

You look at an HTTPS connection issue, and you can soon discern that the crypto-suites do not match, so the connection cannot be negotiated.

You go to a mechanic (assuming you are not knowledgeable about cars), and you can at best partially describe a symptom and when it occurs and your best guess as to why it might occur. That is better than a non-technical person, its true, but a mechanic may be able to speak to you at the same level about computer problems.

As a counterpoint, look around your office at all the people who would not be able to help the mechanic diagnose a problem - they may have domain specific knowledge, but not a troubleshooting mindset.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#28

Post by drblast »

logicallee wrote: post #20
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…

Change the first line of your error message to, "Important: Please mention the following error number when contacting support." you told us that is what you need - but did you tell the user?

Doesn't matter what the error message is. It's very unlikely they're reading the error message at all. And yes, I've tried what you mentioned.

I did fib a bit though. There is one error we get emailed to us regularly. It's a 403:

  {"code": "Forbidden",
   "message": "You do not have access to this
    API feature because you need to be a member
    of role [ROLE]. To get access, follow this
    link to our role request page here: 
    https://linkToRoleRequestPageWithDeadSimpleHTMLForm?role=ROLE"}
THAT error reliably gets copy/pasted in an email to us with the questions "Why am I getting this error?" or "How do I get access to this?"

EDIT: I'm also talking about the JSON output of an internal API whose target audience is developers and people writing scripts. This means that we are all the problem. If the target customer were average Joe user I'd completely understand.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#29

Post by throwanem »

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.

Those of us who are good at addressing user-reported issues learn to do the same. No one in our industry seems much to teach this skill. I wonder why.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#30

Post by banana_giraffe »

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?
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