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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?

#51

Post by emmelaich »

adekok wrote: post #46
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 doi…

> Those points are polite.

I know what you mean and I agree but unfortunately most people don't.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#52

Post by grkvlt »

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…

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
    setting x
      io.number.NumberChecker.java:123
Of course many error messages are completely inscrutable, but it seems nobody reads any of them, parsing it as 'computer says complicated thing' or similar...?

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#53

Post by grkvlt »

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…

Except that the money people will be willing to offer will almost certainly not cover the amount required by any competent professional to pay for their time, i.e USD 100+ per hour. And if someone is willing to pay, say, five hundred dollars for a complex solution that requires effectively half a days consulting, they'd probably be better to just hire an actual consultant.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#54

Post by TwoNineFive »

Help-me zombies can't be reasoned with, or helped.

They don't have brains, and want to eat yours.

"HELP ME" "HELLLLLLLPPPPPP MEEEEEEE"

they screech in the title of their emails and forum posts

Don't be fooled. There is no helping them.

Pardon my humor. I do my share of helping, and seeking of help.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#55

Post by [deleted] »

logicallee wrote: post #32
drblast wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#56

Post by drblast »

logicallee wrote: post #32
drblast wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I like the way you think.

I'm going to change all error messages to:

"Please click this link and type the following GUID into the web page."

That way, based on history, I'll at least get an email with the error copied in. They'll never click the link, but if they do one or the other, I'll have the info I need.

Now if I could just stop people from submitting bug reports for 404 errors...

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#58

Post by logicallee »

drblast wrote: post #56
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…

I like the way you think. I'm going to change all error messages to: "Please click this link and type the following GUID into the web page." That way, based on history, I'll at least get an email with the error copied in. They'll never click the link, but if they do one or the other, I'll have the info I need. Now if I could just stop people from submitting bug reports for 404 errors...

:) good luck!

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#59

Post by InclinedPlane »

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…

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 medicine (and all things really) is for someone to map a problem onto some crude misunderstanding and then state the problem not in the form of a problem but in the form of an unimplemented solution they've thought up.

A classic example: oh, I feel sick, I'm going to go to the doctor and demand antibiotics because antibiotics can fix people when they're sick. Why are the people sick? Maybe they have the flu or norovirus or rotavirus or TB, and a normal course of antibiotics is not going to help any of that. And that's a mild example, doctors have to put up with much, much worse on a regular basis. More so when you consider that people don't want to tell the truth, even to their doctor, about something potentially embarrassing (unprotected sex, drug use, bad diet, what-have-you).

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#60

Post by mercer »

rabboRubble wrote: post #57

From personal experience, telling tech support too little about an error will result in no solution. Being able to tell them too much, oddly, often results in the same.

I think that's kind of the core of the issue. When faced with a problem, in general, it can produce a kind of knee-jerk/panicked reaction.

To come up with a good question requires some level-headed thinking. Give too little information and it's hard to get help. Give too much, and you're either leading support down the wrong path or overwhelming them with useless data (which, somehow, annoys me when people do it to me, which doesn't help).

But because our mind is in agitation/panic mode, we just randomly try stuff, including thoughtless cries for help.

What I find interesting is that I'm just as susceptible to this when it comes to issues with my own work. I've been doing this for quite a while now, and yet I still regularly either thoughtlessly play whack-a-mole with a bug, or alternatively go down some obscure rabbit-hole of searching for answers. Very often in both cases the problem would've been easily solved with a clear head and a methodic approach (no matter which approach, really).

Hell, that's the whole reason 'rubber duck debugging' is a thing and so effective!

I'd say all this applies equally to things like conflicts or relationship issues. So many problems I've had over the years with people just melted away once both parties bothered to stop and think about how they communicate, or even just deciding what the actual problem is. But of course that's the last thing you do in a state of agitation.

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