This is not true, I proof-read the documentation I write!
The Miller Principle (2007)
61–63 of 63 posts
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#62A customer contacts me and says 'I have an error'. After several emails I manage to get them to send me a screenshot of the error. The error message describes the exact problem and what to do about in one short sentence. I type pretty much exactly the error message text into my reply. This solves their problem. I think they see 'error' or 'warning' and they don't even read the rest of the sentence. Extraordinary. But…
They were taught not to read errors because they encountered thousands of errors (in other software) that were less helpful than that one. Most people have an adversarial relationship with software: it is just the pile of broken glass they have to crawl through on the way to getting their task done. This understanding is reinforced and becomes more entrenched with each next paper cut.
I guess it is a mindset thing. Techies see something like this as a problem to solve. Non-techies often panic at the slightest variance from what they were expecting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#63This signals something that is happening somehow predictably due to the increasing abundance of code. It exponentially grows the surface offered for understanding (text as in comments, docs etc) and our attention bandwidth, well, is not exponentially growing, so...
Not a new trend. Mini-article is from 2007. At the time, more reports were generated than humans could read. People weren't reading them for good reason. I suspect author is more annoyed about people being (grossly) negligent in reading important things.
Yeah competence degradation is a worrisome byproduct of this.