I've made that gripe too, but there's something about error messages though that makes them very hard to take in. I don't know why, but I debug crap for a livin

I've made that gripe too, but there's something about error messages though that makes them very hard to take in. I don't know why, but I debug crap for a living, and I still every now and then find myself searching for a bug in Google, only to realise that there are instructions for resolving it in the error message. I can't quite put my finger on why I can't adapt. It's some combination of the facts that 1) there's often a huge dump of information, much of it so technical that it's useful only to the developers, 2) it's fairly rare that it offers a truly useful suggestion, and 3) many of the messages I encounter ask me to do something that makes things easy for the developer rather than the user (update the software, contact the manufacturer). I think it's something we as an industry ought to work harder on, because I don't think the failure is only in the users. I think, although I can't explain exactly why, we're communicating very poorly.