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. Thr

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.