Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Won't You Answer My Question?

rion.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 112 posts

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#91

Post by drunken-serval »

throwanem wrote: post #29
dragonwriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, doctors are trained to ask questions to elicit specific descriptions of symptoms precisely because people all the time do pretty much what you say they never do.

Those of us who are good at addressing user-reported issues learn to do the same. No one in our industry seems much to teach this skill. I wonder why.

> No one in our industry seems much to teach this skill. I wonder why.

It's pretty simple. In a company of any size, customer support is a separate job from development. Asking a programmer to field support calls is like asking an architect to trim grass.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#92

Post by jamesrcole »

noxToken wrote: post #90
jamesrcole wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."…

It's not always this straightforwards. To talk of my own situation:

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

worse in some places, but I get it everywhere

> "Can you describe the pain?"

it's not pain

I don't know how to describe it.

> "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?"

No. I can't.

.

I've been dealing with this for well over 30 years.

Only in the last year have I had a bit of an explanation of why it is indescribable.

It seems likely the issue is a nerve issue, and when the nerve signals to the brain go wrong, the brain doesn't know quite how to interpret them, so you get sensations that are indescribable.

In my experience, basically everyone assumes that if there's a real problem then of course you can explain what it's like. That if you can't then that's your fault.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#93

Post by masklinn »

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 have NEVER gotten that bug report.

That's interesting, at my job we almost get these: we tend to dump tracebacks to the user, and it's common for them to screenshot the traceback (despite the "copy this error" button).

Maybe you should have some sort of inline reporting interface à la Apple where the user can tell you what they were doing and provide contact info?

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#94

Post by noxToken »

jamesrcole wrote: post #92
noxToken wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."…

It's not always this straightforwards. To talk of my own situation: > "Can you give me location? Front of the head? All over? Back of the head? Near the neck?" worse in some places, but I get it everywhere > "Can you describe the pain?" it's not pain I don't know how to describe it. > "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 creep…

I didn't mean this to minimize other peoples' experiences. That example was a dramatized version from my own life when I started having daily migraines. The symptoms I initially gave to the neurologist were all correct, but they were broad. In addition, there were a few related symptoms that I had not realized were connected until I was probed about them.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#95

Post by jamesrcole »

noxToken wrote: post #94
jamesrcole wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always this straightforwards. To talk of my own situation: > "Can you give me location? Front of the head? All over? Back of the head? Near the neck?" worse in some places, but I get it everywhere > "Can you describe the pain?" it's not pain I don't know how to describe it. > "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 creep…

I didn't mean this to minimize other peoples' experiences. That example was a dramatized version from my own life when I started having daily migraines. The symptoms I initially gave to the neurologist were all correct, but they were broad. In addition, there were a few related symptoms that I had not realized were connected until I was probed about them.

> I didn't mean this to minimize other peoples' experiences.

Sure - I didn't meant to take it that way. I just wanted to point out that doctors don't/can't always guide people towards a description.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#96

Post by stevekemp »

arjie wrote: post #68
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Should be easy" is a bozo bit phrase. Whether it should be that way or not, you're going into the slow bucket at that point.

Indeed I had a discussion on reddit recently, trying to help somebody. Their exact words;

   "It should take somebody 20 minutes to fix this if they know python"
At that point I was done with the conversation, though I was tempted to ask what their bug-fixing-budget was..

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#97

Post by makecheck »

To add to the Google point, it makes a big difference to add some double-quotes around the multi-word phrases that belong together (especially when most of your issue is made up of common English words).

Part of the entitlement problem does not seem to be limited to development. There’s a lot of overlap with the way people are being treated in retail, for example. What the hell is it about “I am trying to help you” that just makes some people turn into tyrants and treat helpers like part of the problem?

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#98

Post by wolfgang42 »

masklinn wrote: post #93
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 have NEVER gotten that bug report. That's interesting, at my job we almost get these: we tend to dump tracebacks to the user, and it's common for them to screenshot the traceback (despite the "copy this error" button). Maybe you should have some sort of inline reporting interface à la Apple where the user can tell you what they were doing and provide contact info?

I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility.

I also get a lot of near-misses, where they almost get it right: for example, copying the bit that says "there was an error, please include the information below when you report it" without actually copying the stack trace underneath the message, or copying the first line of the error which says "cannot read property id of undefined" without the stack trace that would tell me what it was trying to do at the time. Also, users who paraphrase the error message instead of copying it (Them: "When I try to view a Thingie, I get an error that it couldn't be read." Me: "Can you copy the exact error message please? There are several different reasons that a Thingie might not be readable, the error should tell me what I need to fix.")

It doesn't help matters that some of the software I inherited uses this antipattern:

    try {
        // Long and complex operation
    } catch (Exception e) {
        Alert("There was an error. Please contact IT.");
        quit();
    }
The first time I got a report for this software was rather confusing. "It says there was an error." "Can you tell me what the error message says?" "Yes, it says 'there was an error.'" "I know, but what was the error message?" "'There was an error!'"

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#99

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#100

Post by upvotinglurker »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #98
masklinn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have NEVER gotten that bug report. That's interesting, at my job we almost get these: we tend to dump tracebacks to the user, and it's common for them to screenshot the traceback (despite the "copy this error" button). Maybe you should have some sort of inline reporting interface à la Apple where the user can tell you what they were doing and provide contact info?

I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility. I also get a lot of near-misses, where they almost get it right: for example, copying the bit that says "there was an error, please include the information below when you report it" without actually copying the stack trace…

>I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility.

Got this from the "IT person" at a small satellite campus of the college I work for. That is how I knew they were not actually an IT person.

Post reply on HN