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I think people don't read error messages if fixing the issue is beyond their immediate capabilities. Computers are scary things that fail in counterintuitive w

by mrtksn 5y ago

I think people don't read error messages if fixing the issue is beyond their immediate capabilities. Computers are scary things that fail in counterintuitive ways. When the handle of your tea cup breaks, the issue is intuitive and most people will be able to understand why it is happening and how to work around it(handle it carefully from the top end end enjoy your tea?). But when it comes to computers, often you need deep understanding of its inner workings to make sense of your observations of problems. Why Xcode would say that it failed to compile my project because usefulExtensions.swift already exists? What it is supposed to mean, I see only one file with that name? That information gives intuitive idea about the issue only if you know how the compiling process works. Why would I know why the package couldn't be found? Unless of course I know how that package manager works. Then I can check if the package manager is configured to look at the correct places. Most error messages are like that. Instantly makes intuitive sense if you know how everything is glued together and makes no sense and needs study if it's outside of you domain of expertise. No one reads error messages unless they can recognise the pattern instantly and there's a data(like the name of the variable) guiding you to the fix.

nanis 5y ago
> Computers are scary things that fail in counterintuitive ways. Not being scared of the tool and believing one's inherent supremacy over it must be the most basic criterion for practicing this craft, but these days this fear is nursed, at times encouraged, at times even exalted (corollary of the failure fetish) especially by those who publicly place themselves as ambassadors. Any introduction to computers must start with the statement that they are all heaps of plastic and sand and the only things they are able to do are because some mortal sat down and spent time figuring it out. People starting out now are at a disadvantage because their first encounters happen mostly through extremely polished looking apps and it is hard to see at the outset how one could go from weird incantations in a text editor to that.
- rjknight 5y ago
  I think it's harder now than it used to be. When I started programming, any error message you saw would almost certainly originate from the beige box on the desk in front of you, which had only a single CPU core and often didn't really do multi-tasking. Over time, our computers, operating systems, applications and networks have become vastly more complex, with the effect that you can't easily build an intuition about which component is responsible for a failure and why. Personally, I love debugging things. I have a very good "theory of mind" for dealing with computer failures, and figuring out why the computer isn't doing what I might naively expect it to do is a lot of fun. However, it's only fun because I've been able to stay on top of the curve as the systems I work with have become more complex. Starting from zero today sounds a lot more daunting.
  - mtVessel 5y ago
    True, the stacks are more complex today, but the resources are greater. Back in the days when the error was in the beige box, if the books/CDs/DVDs you had on your shelf didn't address the exact problem, you had to roll up your sleeves or you were SOL. Nowadays, research skills are more important, but I see a lot of devs who just don't have them. Can't find the answer on the first page of your first (poorly formed) search? Run get the senior dev. To me it reads like incuriousity and laziness, or lack of training. I don't mind doing some coaching, but if you're a dev, and you can't even be bothered to read the error message, what does that say about your effectiveness? /rant
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    It gets a lot less fun when there's a customer visible outage and you need to know why things are failing NOW because dollars are on the line.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  > Any introduction to computers must start with the statement that they are all heaps of plastic This scales to everything IMHO, everything is simple once you understand it. Levels of abstractions is what makes it scary and complex. I.e. electricity or fire is also not scary once you know how to handle it.
  - cestith 5y ago
    One should not have an unreasonable fear of fire, but "unreasonable" is a quite key word there. One should have a healthy respect for it and feel some fear if those around you don't.
- colonelpopcorn 5y ago
  This is the correct comment.
Scarblac 5y ago
> But when it comes to computers, often you need deep understanding of its inner workings to make sense of your observations of problems. They're supposed to have that knowledge, or at least not be afraid to dive in and get that knowledge. There's only one way to build an intuition of what kind of problem probably causes some error (most famously, if the error is completely incomprehensible, you missed a closing thingy on the previous line), and that's by doing the work a lot.
- politician 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the way we’ve organized this industry, a junior developer stuck on an Agile(TM) hamster wheel has no time to dive in and figure it out.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Very very true. When something causes a 1 point story to take three days; bring on the hacks and compromises and ignore anything that doesn't need dealt with to get it out the door.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  > They're supposed to have that knowledge I don't think so. We can do so many amazing things with the computers precisely because we don't have to know how things work. Computers are so many levels of abstractions over printed metal on melted sand. People who know what they are doing will understand the errors of their own creations and will learn the workings of the tools they use to some degrees and will be able to understand the failing modes of these tools with experience over time. No one starts with complete knowledge before start building things. > or at least not be afraid to dive in and get that knowledge. Of course they should have the drive but people's first instinct would be to make the error go away so that they can do their actual work. People have limited time and energy, you can't expect a JS developer, for example, to study inner workings of a Linux box to understand all errors. It's cool when they do and gives them superpowers but it also makes them less productive as JS developers. Sometimes you simply need to implement that button to render on the server without studying the server.
- 5y ago
rudasn 5y ago
> I think people don't read error messages if fixing the issue is beyond their immediate capabilities. How would they obtain those abilities though if not while spending time on the issues brought up and learning how to learn. I think sometimes people are just bored and can't be bothered to find the cause and solution to their issues, and over a long period of time that mentality sticks and becomes second nature resulting in phrases like "this software sucks, I need to read the docs to use it".
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Sure, if they study it then they learn it. The problem is, learning is taxing and many times you encounter these errors when you have more important things to do. When you want to develop your game and the IDE is complaining about something about locating some files, do you think that it is good idea to learn how that IDE organises dependencies? Sometimes you suck it up and learn it and you know next time. However, your first instinct would be to look for ways to make the error go away so that you can immediately start working on the task that you are supposed to work on. That's why we have abstractions and when things work fine we don't know how things work. It shouldn't be expected of you having complete knowledge of all computer systems, tools and frameworks before you can make a ball image bounce on the screen.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Taxing as hell. I have personal projects well underway that go unfinished because of tooling complexity or some other issue causing me to completely derail and spend days figuring out some type of in issue that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm trying to accomplish. Granted, since I have gotten away from visual studio it is much better but I'm t still happens. If it isn't the IDE or package upgrades it's AWS or Azure issues.
zaphar 5y ago
First of all I agree with you. But I would like to note one aspect of this that has always been true. Many times the error message itself is terrible. They say that an error happened and then they give you absolutely no context for the error. My favorite example is when an application happily bubbles up the error from the operating system when a File read/write operation fails. The OS will tell what kind of operation failed. It won't tell you which file you were trying to read or write. It won't tell you what location you were trying to read or write. Basically none of the context you need to really understand what went wrong. You'll have to go read the code in order to mentally reconstruct what the context is. It's silly. If you are writing a file and don't at a minimum catch and then wrap the error with an error of your own that adds the necessary context then you are contributing to the problem here. And that's just one common example. There are many more.
- sgarland 5y ago
  I'm an SRE, so my programs are generally Python scripts < 1K LOC; maybe this isn't scalable, but I write verbose log statements (if it's launched with --verbose, of course). It's not that much effort to change `except OSError as e: log.error(e)` to `except OSError as e: log.error(f"Error accessing {file} - {e}")` If I know typical causes of errors (forgot to connect to the VPN, etc.), I'll include them in the log message as well as things to check.
  - zaphar 5y ago
    That might at least in part be because you are an SRE and at some point you hit your limit of inscrutable error messages happening in production.
Lutger 5y ago
This is a large and ongoing part of becoming a developer. It also happens again every time you try to learn a sufficiently new or alien technology. You know you start to make progress when the error messages begin to make sense. Often you need to know a lot of context before you're even able to determine what the error message is! One error message can lead to a cascade of other error messages, or it's something breaking down as a result of multiple layers of indirection, requiring the developer to careful track the trail of what went wrong and led to another thing failing, which broke down the next thing and ultimately, decided to stop the program and mention only the very last thing falling apart to the user. There might be a directly sensible connection with the original error, but often it's quite unrelated. An experienced developer often immediately recognizes: this is not the actual error message, that other thing is! But for a junior it's all equally incomprehensible. It is detective work with many false leads, and being very new at something it can be so overwhelming you don't know where to begin and immediately assume you will not succeed finding out 'whodunnit', asking your senior co-worker for help.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
“I think people don't read error messages if fixing the issue is beyond their immediate capabilities.” At least capture them so somebody who knows that area can make sense of them.
burnished 5y ago
My own perspective on this was that it felt like my brain would turn to goop when I got an error message, my eyes would cross and I would start frantically googling literally anything, skimming stack overflow, and getting nothing done. In order to progress I had to learn to slow down and start reading error messages and learning what they meant. Sometimes this meant I had to look up a bunch of words, one after another, to understand something incredibly dense. So yeah, I think I largely agree with your assessment, and would only go on to state that the path forward is slowing down to learn vocabulary and think critically. You really speed up after that.
Aeolun 5y ago
But the moment you get these error messages they have to become your domain of study.

by mrtksn 5y ago

nanis 5y ago

> Computers are scary things that fail in counterintuitive ways. Not being scared of the tool and believing one's inherent supremacy over it must be the most basic criterion for practicing this craft, but these days this fear is nursed, at times encouraged, at times even exalted (corollary of the failure fetish) especially by those who publicly place themselves as ambassadors. Any introduction to computers must start with the statement that they are all heaps of plastic and sand and the only things they are able to do are because some mortal sat down and spent time figuring it out. People starting out now are at a disadvantage because their first encounters happen mostly through extremely polished looking apps and it is hard to see at the outset how one could go from weird incantations in a text editor to that.

rjknight 5y ago
I think it's harder now than it used to be. When I started programming, any error message you saw would almost certainly originate from the beige box on the desk in front of you, which had only a single CPU core and often didn't really do multi-tasking. Over time, our computers, operating systems, applications and networks have become vastly more complex, with the effect that you can't easily build an intuition about which component is responsible for a failure and why. Personally, I love debugging things. I have a very good "theory of mind" for dealing with computer failures, and figuring out why the computer isn't doing what I might naively expect it to do is a lot of fun. However, it's only fun because I've been able to stay on top of the curve as the systems I work with have become more complex. Starting from zero today sounds a lot more daunting.
- mtVessel 5y ago
  True, the stacks are more complex today, but the resources are greater. Back in the days when the error was in the beige box, if the books/CDs/DVDs you had on your shelf didn't address the exact problem, you had to roll up your sleeves or you were SOL. Nowadays, research skills are more important, but I see a lot of devs who just don't have them. Can't find the answer on the first page of your first (poorly formed) search? Run get the senior dev. To me it reads like incuriousity and laziness, or lack of training. I don't mind doing some coaching, but if you're a dev, and you can't even be bothered to read the error message, what does that say about your effectiveness? /rant
- jimbokun 5y ago
  It gets a lot less fun when there's a customer visible outage and you need to know why things are failing NOW because dollars are on the line.
mrtksn 5y ago
> Any introduction to computers must start with the statement that they are all heaps of plastic This scales to everything IMHO, everything is simple once you understand it. Levels of abstractions is what makes it scary and complex. I.e. electricity or fire is also not scary once you know how to handle it.
- cestith 5y ago
  One should not have an unreasonable fear of fire, but "unreasonable" is a quite key word there. One should have a healthy respect for it and feel some fear if those around you don't.
colonelpopcorn 5y ago
This is the correct comment.

Scarblac 5y ago

> But when it comes to computers, often you need deep understanding of its inner workings to make sense of your observations of problems. They're supposed to have that knowledge, or at least not be afraid to dive in and get that knowledge. There's only one way to build an intuition of what kind of problem probably causes some error (most famously, if the error is completely incomprehensible, you missed a closing thingy on the previous line), and that's by doing the work a lot.

politician 5y ago
Unfortunately, the way we’ve organized this industry, a junior developer stuck on an Agile(TM) hamster wheel has no time to dive in and figure it out.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Very very true. When something causes a 1 point story to take three days; bring on the hacks and compromises and ignore anything that doesn't need dealt with to get it out the door.
mrtksn 5y ago
> They're supposed to have that knowledge I don't think so. We can do so many amazing things with the computers precisely because we don't have to know how things work. Computers are so many levels of abstractions over printed metal on melted sand. People who know what they are doing will understand the errors of their own creations and will learn the workings of the tools they use to some degrees and will be able to understand the failing modes of these tools with experience over time. No one starts with complete knowledge before start building things. > or at least not be afraid to dive in and get that knowledge. Of course they should have the drive but people's first instinct would be to make the error go away so that they can do their actual work. People have limited time and energy, you can't expect a JS developer, for example, to study inner workings of a Linux box to understand all errors. It's cool when they do and gives them superpowers but it also makes them less productive as JS developers. Sometimes you simply need to implement that button to render on the server without studying the server.
5y ago

rudasn 5y ago

> I think people don't read error messages if fixing the issue is beyond their immediate capabilities. How would they obtain those abilities though if not while spending time on the issues brought up and learning how to learn. I think sometimes people are just bored and can't be bothered to find the cause and solution to their issues, and over a long period of time that mentality sticks and becomes second nature resulting in phrases like "this software sucks, I need to read the docs to use it".

mrtksn 5y ago
Sure, if they study it then they learn it. The problem is, learning is taxing and many times you encounter these errors when you have more important things to do. When you want to develop your game and the IDE is complaining about something about locating some files, do you think that it is good idea to learn how that IDE organises dependencies? Sometimes you suck it up and learn it and you know next time. However, your first instinct would be to look for ways to make the error go away so that you can immediately start working on the task that you are supposed to work on. That's why we have abstractions and when things work fine we don't know how things work. It shouldn't be expected of you having complete knowledge of all computer systems, tools and frameworks before you can make a ball image bounce on the screen.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Taxing as hell. I have personal projects well underway that go unfinished because of tooling complexity or some other issue causing me to completely derail and spend days figuring out some type of in issue that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm trying to accomplish. Granted, since I have gotten away from visual studio it is much better but I'm t still happens. If it isn't the IDE or package upgrades it's AWS or Azure issues.

zaphar 5y ago

First of all I agree with you. But I would like to note one aspect of this that has always been true. Many times the error message itself is terrible. They say that an error happened and then they give you absolutely no context for the error. My favorite example is when an application happily bubbles up the error from the operating system when a File read/write operation fails. The OS will tell what kind of operation failed. It won't tell you which file you were trying to read or write. It won't tell you what location you were trying to read or write. Basically none of the context you need to really understand what went wrong. You'll have to go read the code in order to mentally reconstruct what the context is. It's silly. If you are writing a file and don't at a minimum catch and then wrap the error with an error of your own that adds the necessary context then you are contributing to the problem here. And that's just one common example. There are many more.

sgarland 5y ago
I'm an SRE, so my programs are generally Python scripts < 1K LOC; maybe this isn't scalable, but I write verbose log statements (if it's launched with --verbose, of course). It's not that much effort to change `except OSError as e: log.error(e)` to `except OSError as e: log.error(f"Error accessing {file} - {e}")` If I know typical causes of errors (forgot to connect to the VPN, etc.), I'll include them in the log message as well as things to check.
- zaphar 5y ago
  That might at least in part be because you are an SRE and at some point you hit your limit of inscrutable error messages happening in production.

Lutger 5y ago

This is a large and ongoing part of becoming a developer. It also happens again every time you try to learn a sufficiently new or alien technology. You know you start to make progress when the error messages begin to make sense. Often you need to know a lot of context before you're even able to determine what the error message is! One error message can lead to a cascade of other error messages, or it's something breaking down as a result of multiple layers of indirection, requiring the developer to careful track the trail of what went wrong and led to another thing failing, which broke down the next thing and ultimately, decided to stop the program and mention only the very last thing falling apart to the user. There might be a directly sensible connection with the original error, but often it's quite unrelated. An experienced developer often immediately recognizes: this is not the actual error message, that other thing is! But for a junior it's all equally incomprehensible. It is detective work with many false leads, and being very new at something it can be so overwhelming you don't know where to begin and immediately assume you will not succeed finding out 'whodunnit', asking your senior co-worker for help.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

“I think people don't read error messages if fixing the issue is beyond their immediate capabilities.” At least capture them so somebody who knows that area can make sense of them.

burnished 5y ago

My own perspective on this was that it felt like my brain would turn to goop when I got an error message, my eyes would cross and I would start frantically googling literally anything, skimming stack overflow, and getting nothing done. In order to progress I had to learn to slow down and start reading error messages and learning what they meant. Sometimes this meant I had to look up a bunch of words, one after another, to understand something incredibly dense. So yeah, I think I largely agree with your assessment, and would only go on to state that the path forward is slowing down to learn vocabulary and think critically. You really speed up after that.

Aeolun 5y ago

But the moment you get these error messages they have to become your domain of study.