I’m a web developer and I’ve learned they’ll freeze at any sign of an error.
Shit, I’ll write an error message like “carrier credentials missing” and users will still come to me and I’ll say “oh it’s because the carrier credentials are missing” then they’ll go on to solve the problem.
I’ve never understood the mentality of offloading reading comprehension to others. Why do I bother to write clear error messages at all?
And when you make them short they complain that the message is too short to have any meaning. And when you add one word to make it clearer they complain that it’s too much to read.
I’ve never understood the mentality of offloading reading comprehension to others. Why do I bother to write clear error messages at all?
You’re not writing error messages for your users. You’re writing them for you. Most users, especially the higher up the chain you go, are not computer savvy in the least. In fact, they know maybe a handful of apps and only specific to what they need to use it for. They are absolutely terrified of anything that is not what they know, because they know that could mean their job if the problem is big enough (data loss, hacking, etc).
Hollywood has done a fantastic job of drilling that into the consumer. Just like every Hollywood movie always has that one squeaky computer nerd who can fix anything just by looking at the screen. Those nerds also terrify people because it reflects on how little those people know, and that’s always scary.
Long story short, write your logging for you; not them. If anything it makes you look like the hero every time. And Hollywood also taught us to adore our heroes.
I did some part time IT at my last job. IT really ruins your respect for people and faith in humanity. There were so many tickets we got that were just “I got this error message I didn’t read”.
Hell, for a few months there was a bug in our ERP’s clock in system. The client’s time would desync from the server’s time (don’t know why the system didn’t just treat the server time as authoritative), so we added a message when that happened “Please close this program and reopen it, you are not clocked in/out” and it would secretly log the user that didn’t clock in. There was one dude that tried like 5 tikes to clock in on the same machine, another time we could see that he got the message and tried a different computer and then another and another and another before finding one that worked.
No one reads error messages no matter how clear and concise they are. No matter how simple the instructions are.
Yeah man I have mad respect for IT. I’m a developer but my coworker and I also provide support for our application (it’s internal only). I’m always blown away by the stupid tickets that web developers themselves open — like bro you couldn’t bother to open the developer tools in the browser to see the network response or JavaScript exception or whatever??
I’m a software developer, though one of my minors in college was IT so I didn’t mind doing IT work, but man. I am at my current job writing tools for internal use, and most of the questions I get asked are just thing’s I literally wrote in the documentation.
A few weeks ago I got a meeting invite asking how to enable some feature, it was literally described on a step by step instruction in the documentation that is supplied along side the tool. I am getting pretty miffed about needing to read to my coworkers
Ok sure but having your solution to the problem require a user to use a mouse and keyboard instead of their normal interaction of “tap badge to kiosk” is pretty shit.
I don’t do IT but did become an office translation layer for the IT team before they sent someone to our compound. The real problem is “It gave me an error and stopped working.”
“What did the error say?”
“I don’t remember, I closed out of it.”
Like… That’s the information I need to effectively tell IT if they can help, why did you close it?
Whenever I opened a ticket, I’m like, “Here’s the error, a screenshot of the error, and I restarted and replicated the error.”
Normies froze like a deer in headlights when they see the contents of a log file, any log file. Total mental paralysis.
I’m a web developer and I’ve learned they’ll freeze at any sign of an error.
Shit, I’ll write an error message like “carrier credentials missing” and users will still come to me and I’ll say “oh it’s because the carrier credentials are missing” then they’ll go on to solve the problem.
I’ve never understood the mentality of offloading reading comprehension to others. Why do I bother to write clear error messages at all?
And when you make them short they complain that the message is too short to have any meaning. And when you add one word to make it clearer they complain that it’s too much to read.
You’re not writing error messages for your users. You’re writing them for you. Most users, especially the higher up the chain you go, are not computer savvy in the least. In fact, they know maybe a handful of apps and only specific to what they need to use it for. They are absolutely terrified of anything that is not what they know, because they know that could mean their job if the problem is big enough (data loss, hacking, etc).
Hollywood has done a fantastic job of drilling that into the consumer. Just like every Hollywood movie always has that one squeaky computer nerd who can fix anything just by looking at the screen. Those nerds also terrify people because it reflects on how little those people know, and that’s always scary.
Long story short, write your logging for you; not them. If anything it makes you look like the hero every time. And Hollywood also taught us to adore our heroes.
Right but in this specific case if I just didn’t show that there were no credentials configured then I’d be yelled at for it “not working.”
I did some part time IT at my last job. IT really ruins your respect for people and faith in humanity. There were so many tickets we got that were just “I got this error message I didn’t read”.
Hell, for a few months there was a bug in our ERP’s clock in system. The client’s time would desync from the server’s time (don’t know why the system didn’t just treat the server time as authoritative), so we added a message when that happened “Please close this program and reopen it, you are not clocked in/out” and it would secretly log the user that didn’t clock in. There was one dude that tried like 5 tikes to clock in on the same machine, another time we could see that he got the message and tried a different computer and then another and another and another before finding one that worked.
No one reads error messages no matter how clear and concise they are. No matter how simple the instructions are.
Yeah man I have mad respect for IT. I’m a developer but my coworker and I also provide support for our application (it’s internal only). I’m always blown away by the stupid tickets that web developers themselves open — like bro you couldn’t bother to open the developer tools in the browser to see the network response or JavaScript exception or whatever??
I’m a software developer, though one of my minors in college was IT so I didn’t mind doing IT work, but man. I am at my current job writing tools for internal use, and most of the questions I get asked are just thing’s I literally wrote in the documentation.
A few weeks ago I got a meeting invite asking how to enable some feature, it was literally described on a step by step instruction in the documentation that is supplied along side the tool. I am getting pretty miffed about needing to read to my coworkers
Ok sure but having your solution to the problem require a user to use a mouse and keyboard instead of their normal interaction of “tap badge to kiosk” is pretty shit.
I don’t do IT but did become an office translation layer for the IT team before they sent someone to our compound. The real problem is “It gave me an error and stopped working.”
“What did the error say?”
“I don’t remember, I closed out of it.”
Like… That’s the information I need to effectively tell IT if they can help, why did you close it?
Whenever I opened a ticket, I’m like, “Here’s the error, a screenshot of the error, and I restarted and replicated the error.”
@grok explain this comment to me? why is it bad to offload reading ot others?
I appreciated this joke in a way that would have been easily mistaken for hostility in person