this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can't count the number of times I've seen an error message that just says "an error has occurred" and you're left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone's app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it's the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like "An error has occurred".
If the error message is that stupid, I'm 100% with you. I suspect that's the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.
However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don't understand that information, it's not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they're participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don't know because they have dismissed it.
THIS! THIS SO MUCH! And that's why I took over training all new employees. I teach them how to think. And every time I've fixed a problem, I explain to users what happened. As a result, my overall number of tickets has decreased and my users are now better equipped to solve their own issues.