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I don't mind that 'hello' or 'hi mackatsol' .. as I know more is coming. What drives me crazy is people who say "can I ask you a question?" I really try hard no

I don't mind that 'hello' or 'hi mackatsol' .. as I know more is coming. What drives me crazy is people who say "can I ask you a question?" I really try hard not to say "you just did". None of those compare to those folks who do not understand that to help them we need details. How do I infer what a problem is without any details? I used to ask all sorts of questions so as to be able to help them. Now I tend to post a 'More details please! Once I have those I can help you.' What amazes me is that sometimes we get no response at all! (By we I mean those of us in the channel/group). Note that these are co-workers who have been told many many times that we need some basic details to be able to do anything at all, like a client's domain name, or a client id in our CMS.

dvtrn 6y ago
I feel this in my bones, and have been trying to get engineering managers to work with their teams on creating better tickets because in a company of nearly a two hundred developers including a massive overseas contingent, but a painfully understaffed ops and infrastructure team of 3: “My build doesn’t work, please prioritize” Does not help me help you. I wish I were making it up that this is the level of detail with which people ask my team to stop what they are doing and render aid (we don’t, when it’s that bare). These are developers who you’d think would know how to flesh out an error ticket and at least be somewhat specific in what they’re asking for. What build? What repo is the build pipeline attached to? What’s the error message (many of the times these were errors that could have been self-solved if the developer bothered read the error message to notice they forgot to close a bracket. I’ve pointed to this to their leads. It doesn’t change) Do you know how many developers are using the pipelines we’ve build for them? Do you realize how many development initiatives are going on? I’d hope so, we Go over then as a tech division with a regular cadence. What product are you working on? Which feature branch? How about so much as a screenshot or a link to the repo where the build is failing? So. What I’ve done is gone to all of their engineering leads, showed them examples of the ticket. Explained my problem. And told them “if your people can’t help us enough by being descriptive and at least putting a link to the build with the error they’re seeing, it’s not getting prioritized it won’t even be triaged”
- nelsondev 6y ago
  We had this problem of poorly phrased tickets, and we added a rule to our ticketing software to immediately respond with a list of questions they need to answer to prove they did due diligence before we would start answering. It worked, we got less tickets, and the ones that answered the questions we could resolve faster.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I proposed something similar to our Jira Admin, since I lack the privileges to just do it and ask permission later: we need certain form fields to be "required" to cut down on that back and forth. Even put together a bit of a workflow in a project that I have "Project Lead" status on to show him how it could be done, if Issue Type is this, change the view and make these fields required. That was...9 months ago. I'm still waiting for it. Side effect of everyone being too busy I guess, which is a chronic problem at org.
Cederfjard 6y ago
”Can I ask you a question?” obviously isn’t that literal, but more of a shorthand for ”do you have the time, energy and inclination to have a discussion with me right now to figure out the answer to a question I have?”. I personally try to ask the question straight away, with some caveats and pleasantries added if needed to avoid friction and stressing people out, but I do think it’s fair enough to do it like above as well. You show that you’re respecting the other person’s time by not dragging them too far into a conversation before they’ve agreed to have it, and you don’t have to write out the full question right then and there if it turns out the person is not available for it at the moment.
sopooneo 6y ago
That drives me bananas too. I had some minor luck by positively calling out people who did provide great details. I’d send a message out to a wider group copying the original request, pointing out what was so good and saying how much time they’d saved us. Also how much effective cost was saved. I’d include a supervisor if possible. I tried to be really nice about it and was floored by how surprised some people were that those base level details made any difference at all.
ht_th 6y ago
> What drives me crazy is people who say "can I ask you a question?" I really try hard not to say "you just did". Yes! And the same things happens in real life as well. As a teacher, I get quite often this same question: "Can I ask something?" To which I always reply: "Apparently!" In the classroom I am trying to establish a local "classroom culture" wherein students feel safe to ask anything. I suppose we should also try to establish a local "chatroom culture" with norms, expectations, responsibilities, and so on.

dvtrn 6y ago

I feel this in my bones, and have been trying to get engineering managers to work with their teams on creating better tickets because in a company of nearly a two hundred developers including a massive overseas contingent, but a painfully understaffed ops and infrastructure team of 3: “My build doesn’t work, please prioritize” Does not help me help you. I wish I were making it up that this is the level of detail with which people ask my team to stop what they are doing and render aid (we don’t, when it’s that bare). These are developers who you’d think would know how to flesh out an error ticket and at least be somewhat specific in what they’re asking for. What build? What repo is the build pipeline attached to? What’s the error message (many of the times these were errors that could have been self-solved if the developer bothered read the error message to notice they forgot to close a bracket. I’ve pointed to this to their leads. It doesn’t change) Do you know how many developers are using the pipelines we’ve build for them? Do you realize how many development initiatives are going on? I’d hope so, we Go over then as a tech division with a regular cadence. What product are you working on? Which feature branch? How about so much as a screenshot or a link to the repo where the build is failing? So. What I’ve done is gone to all of their engineering leads, showed them examples of the ticket. Explained my problem. And told them “if your people can’t help us enough by being descriptive and at least putting a link to the build with the error they’re seeing, it’s not getting prioritized it won’t even be triaged”

nelsondev 6y ago
We had this problem of poorly phrased tickets, and we added a rule to our ticketing software to immediately respond with a list of questions they need to answer to prove they did due diligence before we would start answering. It worked, we got less tickets, and the ones that answered the questions we could resolve faster.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I proposed something similar to our Jira Admin, since I lack the privileges to just do it and ask permission later: we need certain form fields to be "required" to cut down on that back and forth. Even put together a bit of a workflow in a project that I have "Project Lead" status on to show him how it could be done, if Issue Type is this, change the view and make these fields required. That was...9 months ago. I'm still waiting for it. Side effect of everyone being too busy I guess, which is a chronic problem at org.

Cederfjard 6y ago

”Can I ask you a question?” obviously isn’t that literal, but more of a shorthand for ”do you have the time, energy and inclination to have a discussion with me right now to figure out the answer to a question I have?”. I personally try to ask the question straight away, with some caveats and pleasantries added if needed to avoid friction and stressing people out, but I do think it’s fair enough to do it like above as well. You show that you’re respecting the other person’s time by not dragging them too far into a conversation before they’ve agreed to have it, and you don’t have to write out the full question right then and there if it turns out the person is not available for it at the moment.

sopooneo 6y ago

That drives me bananas too. I had some minor luck by positively calling out people who did provide great details. I’d send a message out to a wider group copying the original request, pointing out what was so good and saying how much time they’d saved us. Also how much effective cost was saved. I’d include a supervisor if possible. I tried to be really nice about it and was floored by how surprised some people were that those base level details made any difference at all.

ht_th 6y ago

> What drives me crazy is people who say "can I ask you a question?" I really try hard not to say "you just did". Yes! And the same things happens in real life as well. As a teacher, I get quite often this same question: "Can I ask something?" To which I always reply: "Apparently!" In the classroom I am trying to establish a local "classroom culture" wherein students feel safe to ask anything. I suppose we should also try to establish a local "chatroom culture" with norms, expectations, responsibilities, and so on.