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Why Won't You Answer My Question?

rion.io

71–80 of 112 posts

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#71

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…

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…

And to bring it back to IT, we get this same thing all the time too. So often I get emails where people just launch into these convoluted accusations of how (made up example) I made our site stop working in desktop browsers because all we care about is phones now because that's where the money is (or some such insanity). Turns out it's actually some malware screwing up their copy of IE9 or whatever.

SO often it's not even a statement of a problem, but just, "Why'd you break it?!" often not even stating _what_ is supposedly broken, since in their mind it's obvious.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#72

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…

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...

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#73
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 work. Too many people don't read the instructions, or do but don't follow them, not matter how much big, red, bold, flashing text tricks you use.

The only reliable way around it we've found with our clients is to be dickish with SLAs: insufficient information means the SLA clock stops dead. No error code/message details, no SLA, and I can & do take my merry time (if I ever get around to looking at that ticket instead of the many that do have sufficient information).

Though it helps that our large clients always knock down support costs by refusing to pay for first-line support because "our internal helpdesk can do that" so they should be performing at least minimal triage. It might not wash in other environments.

The really irritating part is when they seem to do their level best to avoid giving any specific details:

Them: some users are having a problem with a form

Us: which users? Could you name at least some, and if any don't have the problem name at least one of them. And which form? And do they get a specific error?

Them: Actually it is quite a few users.

Us: which users? Could you name at least some, and if any don't have the problem name at least one of them. And which form? And do they get a specific error? Is the problem loading information or saving it? IF the latter does any of the data save despite the error?

Them: More users are now reporting the error.

Us: which users? Could you name at least some, and if any don't have the problem name at least one of them. And which form? And do they get a specific error? Is the problem loading information or saving it? IF the latter does any of the data save despite the error?

Lather, rince, repeat, until I state something like "we've tried with several user types and several forms in our test services, and can't reproduce the problem, unless you can produce the details requested we'll have to close the ticket as "can not reproduce", at which point they get shirty about us not being helpful but do provide the information requested.

Yes, I can often work out exactly what is going on from various exception logs, and sometimes to just to get the buggers off my back so I can get on with something more useful and interesting, but I resent having to dig for details that it would take almost no effort for them to provide either up front or after my initial request for clarification. IT isn't just "lay users" either, it is often people who really really should know better. IF you find yourself on the other side of this equation: give all the detail you can FFS, help us help you (countpoint: only give us facts, don't guess or otherwise make shit up).

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#74
post #52

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…

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…

The most ignored real error like this that i see continuously is:

    C:\Users\Mithaldu>perl -MDoesnt::Exist
    Can't locate Doesnt/Exist.pm in @INC (you may need to install the Doesnt::Exist module) (@INC contains: C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-64int C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib C:/strawberry/perl/vendor/lib C:/strawberry/perl/lib .).
    BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#75
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire anyone who has the patience to answer questions on places like Stack Overflow or mailing lists. I don't have that particular helping gene. I'll help you move, though.

I had when I was a teenager; I'd spend endless hours explaining C++ to people on Internet forums. It was a kind of pastime for me. Somehow, I've lost most of that "helping gene" over the years. I'll still happily explain things to people, but I don't look for occasions to explain stuff on purpose anymore.

For me it has a few factors: I learn, memorize, and internalize through argument and learning to explain things to others. Eventually my skill ceiling rises in a topic where this no longer applies much. But, if I can spend 5 seconds to save someone 5 hours, I'm likely to help unless I thoroughly dislike the person - it's just too high of a positive impact. With my peers, I'll accept much worse ratios (e.g. spend 1 hour to save you 2) under the vague unstated assumption that you'd do the same for me, or it'll help accomplish our common goal faster. And in the special case of helping people with research and problem solving skills, it'll sometimes make people less annoying :)

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#76
I sometimes use a variant of rubber duck debugging. Two projects I have been responsible for started by me taking over from a contractor who was on-call to resolve issues. I would start an email to him describing the problems and asking good questions. More often as my understanding of the systems progressed the emails would not get sent since the act of explaining it to someone I knew could fix the problem led me to understand the error.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#77
post #67
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…

> Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose This battle is indeed being fought since forever [0], of which this blog post is basically the nth dupe of. [0]: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Yeah I came here just to post this link since this was one of the first guides I literally printed out and had on my desk per request of an old friend.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#78
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…

> No one goes to the doctor and says: [...] - I don't know, I just feel bad.

Yes they do!

And as someone who has had a lot of difficulty explaining the symptoms I've faced (I never had the concepts to describe them) it kinda drives me crazy when people assume that symptoms must always be easy to describe (the assumption usually being that if they can't be clearly articulated they somehow aren't real).

[edit: made my description a bit clearer]

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#79

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.

I don't know if that's true, but it certainly feels that way - some people seem to be unable to ever learn how to ask for help. I don't know the reasons, be it laziness, low IQ, other character traits, learned and ingrained attitudes, whatever - but they are extremely resistant to any kind of education on how to solve problems (and asking for help is one of the skills included in problem-solving). For such people the term "help-me zombie" is quite fitting, I feel.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#80
post #66
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.

This is very true. A verbose log is incredibly helpful to someone who can read them, but if you are unfamiliar with the format, or find bits that you cannot interpret, then it all starts to look like noise.

It reminds me of my cousin, who is a ranger in a national park, when she says something like: "Oh, the deer have been here!" whilst pointing to a patch of ground which looks totally indistinguishable from all the other patches of ground which presumably do not show traces of deer.

Your brain gets trained to see subtle changes only after several exposures to meaning. Joel Spolsky had a similar scenario where the bread making machines looked clean to a trained eye, but not to an untrained one.

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