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Hey everyone! This is a new community focused on NonPolitical Comics (NPCs), which essentially means no gloom and doom of the day stuff.
Hey everyone! This is a new community focused on NonPolitical Comics (NPCs), which essentially means no gloom and doom of the day stuff.
And people wonder why people who do IT work are dicks. MF, just read the error message. Internalize the message. The message tells you what to do or what the problem is.
There’s just something most people don’t think when they say “just read the error” and that’s the knowledge you’ve gathered over the years.
A doctor can read through your test results in 5 minutes and know instantly what’s the problem, while you’re still stuck googling the first abbreviation
Or doctor looking at console output about killing children, it’s not obvious without knowing the context
You are giving end users too much credit.
I get like a half dozen emails a day about “an error message”, which I always have to go back and ask what the message actually says
The replies to these are always screenshots, because if it wasn’t they may have accidentally read it by mistake
About half the time, the error message is “credit card on file is expired” or “12a-482-223 is not a valid phone number”, or some other thing that makes it impossible for me to send an email reply that isn’t condescending, but when I just say “it means your credit card is expired”, I get thanked for how prompt I was at solving their problem
Yeah, I don’t think they realize what a bad analogy this is. Hell I’d argue it’s straight up faulty analogy fallacy. Computers are designed to be useable by humans and programmers want users to know the fix to the problem. We’ve had to reverse engineer how the human body works but the computer and software is man made. The problem isn’t your hemocrit is 7.3 it’s your credit card expired, this program is in an unusable state please close it and reopen it, your computer needs to update please restart it, the program can’t get new messages because the computer isn’t connected to the internet.
Use OCR to change it into text and then send the whole error back. See if they notice.
These messages are rarely more than 6 words, so OCR is kind of overkill
If the error requires a developer (me) to look into it, I capture it in the backend - the only messages I pass on to the client are those a 6th grader could understand
I can’t tell you how many times I personally have been called to help someone with a computer problem where the error message tells the the easy solution. Close and reopen the program, restart your computer, time to change your password using this easy UI, connect to the internet.
Half the time the error message tells users the exact easy solution to do. Call me when it’s the other half.
Not so easy on windows with generic error messages (or worse, codes) and shoddy logging. Also even if you know what’s wrong finding a solution despite the army of seo slop isn’t so easy.
That was my favorite thing about Arch Linux. Things will break, perhaps even more than windows or ubuntu but at least troubleshooting is easier
Oh I agree, issues on windows can be convoluted but restarts usually fix most of them. But yeah random fucking hex error codes that mean 1 of like 6 things and all the solutions are 4 years old and are no longer possible annoy the shit out of me.
Working as a developer, I sometimes get questions regarding issues where the error message contains jack shit. And way too often, I was the one who wrote the error message.