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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?

#81

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

js2 wrote: post #43
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…

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

You're complaining about such a message??? It's pure poetry!

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#82

Post by averagewall »

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?)

Similar to remembering you forgot your keys the moment you step outside and shut the door. My theory is that stop deliberately struggling to think and your brain is suddenly free to start processing things subconsciously, which can generate solutions to complex problems.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#83

Post by mgkimsal »

jamesrcole wrote: post #78
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…

> 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…

Had a family member who got sick traveling over in Japan. He can speak Japanese OK - enough to get around and have conversations, but he got sick. In a smallish village. At night. Found one chemist open late. Trying to describe your symptoms in your native tongue is hard enough - trying to do it in a language you're not fluent in was multiple steps harder. That was one of those crazy stupid "oh yeah, that could happen" situations that never crossed my mind when traveling abroad.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#84

Post by lloeki »

js2 wrote: post #43
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…

> certain nationality

Sounds like a word to word translation from french "Merci de faire le nécessaire".

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#85

Post by averagewall »

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 reason is they assume you already know about the bug. Surely thousands of other users have reported it already. So you probably already have a workaround ready or know when it'll be fixed. Their vague description is really just meant to remind you which bug they're talking about, not help you discover it.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#86

Post by crispyambulance »

What we have here is literally a 21-point checklist that someone needs to go through before deigning to ask a question so as not to piss off the IT guy. We've all seen it before, hundreds of times, stackoverflow has made asking a question into a sacrament, yes, with the same level of sanctimony.

Perhaps that's not working? Perhaps its time to consider other approaches especially since complaints with such detailed advice for resolution ARE NOT READ by the people that actually need to read them? How is sharing this on HN REALLY going to help people ask better questions?

Many tech people fail to understand that having knowledge and giving knowledge are two distinct things. Just because you know something in great detail and can practice it with fantastic skill, doesn't mean you're able to answer basic questions about it or teach anyone to do the same. The problem is not just "asking the right question" but also the skill of "giving the right answer".

To a large extent this territory is covered well by teachers of all kinds. Pedagogy itself takes practice. I wonder if anyone has written a blog post with a 21 point checklist on how to ANSWER questions?

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#87

Post by bkkssnn »

tempestn wrote: post #71
InclinedPlane wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get these alot aswell, especially from more senior testers that never woorked as developers. They make up some crude model of a solution for what they think the problem is that they concluded from god knows what.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#88

Post by jamesrcole »

tambourine_man wrote: post #48
SilasX wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hardly metaphysics. As if anything that we don't have good language for describing must be metaphysics.

Think of all the progress in science and medicine there's been over the centuries, where we've developed understandings and ways of describing things that we didn't have in the past. The actual things being described always existed, we just didn't understand them or know how to describe them. It's got nothing to do with metaphysics at all. It's about our human limitations.

Speaking from my own experience, I had medical symptoms for over 30 years that I didn't know how to explain. There doesn't seem to be any existing concepts for them.

I have only very recently come to realise that they are probably due to some sort of nerve-related issues -- where this is the reason why they're hard to explain. Something is causing problems with the signals to the brain, so the brain doesn't quite know how to interpret it, which is why you get something indescribable. (or at least that's what seems likely to be going on in my case).

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#89

Post by BaronSamedi »

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…

Well, you can try to make people smarter (good luck with that!) or you could focus on something you can actually control such as delivering better software. Three things we as software developers normally do poorly that could help a lot:

1. Write decent documentation, i.e. actual user guides instead of reference manuals. Most software is under-documented by an order of magnitude and the documentation is simply terrible.

2. Write log messages that are meaningful to the intended users (end-users, sys admins, etc.) instead of "Error 3023: 0xFFFF flux capacitor initialization exception".

3. Make the software interactively help the user overcome the problem. Put some smarts into it. Showing an error popup and then crashing is lazy. Or worse, crash silently and then write a log message that the user can neither find nor understand.

Yes, people are dumb but we do a lot dumb things too. We should look at ourselves first.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#90

Post by noxToken »

jamesrcole wrote: post #78
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…

> 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…

But at least with a doctor visit, the doctor can start lobbing mortar shells, and you have the ability to help walk the doc on target. I feel like this analogy is very apt, because to better troubleshoot, developers/IT can try to help testers/clients/customers walk the issue on target.

"I feel like absolute crap, and I really don't know how to describe it. It's a headache, but it doesn't feel like a normal headache."

"Can you give me location? Front of the head? All over? Back of the head? Near the neck?"

"Front of the head I guess."

"Can you describe the pain?"

"It hurts intensely."

"Alright. For the average headache, can you give me a rating on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain you've ever felt?"

"Maybe a 6?"

"Can you describe it? Does it feel like a constant pressure? Is it a sharp stabbing pain? Does it feel like a dull stimulus that creeps over you?"

Here, a patient is walking the doctor on target. And with bugs:

"The application broke."

"Can you tell me what you were doing?"

"Nothing. I just used it like normal. I wasn't trying to break anything."

"What portion of the application were you on when it stopped working? And can you show me in the application exactly what you were doing right before it stopped?"

And here, we are walking the user on target.

Of course, it would be great if we could skip the whole rigmarole if the user somehow realized that we are going to ask the exact same questions every time.

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