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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?

#41

Post by arcosdev »

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.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#42

Post by logicallee »

fencepost wrote: post #39
logicallee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you need to lie in your error messages and come up with a message that will get emailed to you. How about. "Forbidden. Please request access by following this link: http://internal/?requestguid=GUID&custn=CUSTNAME Your request will be handled within 24 hours." That link? If they click the link - which they will - you have all the information they should email you (but don't.) Because you told us all you need is th…

You forgot the important extra part: "If you ignore that link and instead email this to us, we'll try to get back to you within 5 business days."

I don't think there's any reason to be passive aggressive. If you give users two options they'll choose the one that's worse for you and worse for them. :)

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#43

Post by js2 »

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, which was particular to a certain nationality, was this one (which we got quite often):

"The Internet is down. Please do the needful."

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#44

Post by jtraffic »

I haven't taken much CS, but I took a class on computationally intensive statistics. It changed my life, because every week I was assigned to do things that we hardly covered in class. I felt so lost for while, until I got the hang of the stuff described in this post. It's really empowering. The only constraint becomes time, not intelligence.

I always find it sad when people are impressed that I "can program." Not only because people tend to think of it as binary when it's not, but because they think programming, like math, is the exclusive domain of people with certain inherent qualities.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#45

Post by adekok »

drblast wrote: post #28
logicallee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: ht…

My $0.02 is that people who submit such bug reports need to be fired. They're adding negative value to the company.

I get such bug reports for my open source project. People get offended when I point out that the message says what they need to do.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#46

Post by adekok »

emmelaich wrote: post #37

Part of the problem is that the best advice sounds aggressive or rude. What I'm thinking of is from bugzilla: 1. what did you do? 2. what did you get? 3. what did you expect? It's very hard to couch this politely enough for colleagues to take it on without a sense of resentment.

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 doing his job".

The effect is that management pushed people to be incompetent, in the guise of "getting along". The competent technical people tend to leave such organizations.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#47

Post by tambourine_man »

csours wrote: post #27
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'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 oc…

I think you're onto something regarding the troubleshooting mindset.

I know very little of cars, but I used to arrive at the mechanic with a clear problem: overheating, noise while turning the wheel, flashing light on the dashboard, etc. No need to know the solution, just articulate the problem.

I fell like computers occupy almost the realm of magic in most people's mind. When it works, it's great, when it doesn't, why bother, it's beyond comprehension.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#48

Post by tambourine_man »

SilasX wrote: post #33
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…

In fairness, the biggest problems in life are those where something is wrong but you can't clearly define what it is. Once it reaches the point where the problem has been clearly isolated and the soliton path identified, I usually don't count it as a problem anymore.

We're reaching metaphysics here, but yeah, it's a good point.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#49

Post by nol13 »

Ralfp wrote: post #8

Doing open source in my free time, I've found solace in realizing what is worse than getting barrage of unresearched, silly, or perhaps bad questions: Getting no questions at all. This means that nobody is using your project, and that makes me feel defeated far more than having person ask me why he uploaded my project's python files to public_html on his $2 shared hosting, and no app is showing up in his browser.

was so excited to get my first github issue!

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#50

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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 with an
  error like this:

  Directive 'UseDNS' is not allowed within a Match block [FAILED]

  I presume what's actually causing this is some script in whm that goes
  and adds something like this bit in sshd_config:

  Match User [my user name] 
		PasswordAuthentication yes 
		UseDNS  no

  The "UseDNS no" should be _before_ the "Match user ... "etc (that's the
  match block from the error message).

  I've no idea what part of whm is doing this but it's doing it wrong- get
  someone who knows perl to fix it, it should be dead easy.

  My doctor has advised me to stay away from perl for life
That was after I spent an hour or so chatting with their tech support to try and unscrew my SSHD after it suddendly stopped authenticating me (probably because they updated to a borked version of whm). So yeah, they knew what I was talking about alright (and, yes, I sent that to the right people, check).

I never heard back from them. I think that's an informative message, isn't it? I (a) relayed the error message (b) pointed at the cause of the error message (c) explained how to fix it

But they didn't even write back to say that yeah, they knew and were going to fix it. Isn't that a shame?

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