4 ms·

It can be easy to think that since your problem seemingly happened so easily, surely it must already be well-known and you just need to identify the problem to

It can be easy to think that since your problem seemingly happened so easily, surely it must already be well-known and you just need to identify the problem to the support staff so they can give you their already-known answer. I've fallen into this trap myself sometimes. Also, sometimes it's true. I get support emails where I see the subject line and know immediately what's wrong. Another thing is people are trained to ignore the content of error messages, probably because usually they're totally useless or meaningless. I used to teach computers at school and kids would demonstrate the problem they're having but when the error message popped up, they're reflexively close it. I'd have to get them to start again so we can read the message. Error messages really are stupid. If you try to copy photos from an Iphone to a Windows, it can fail with either "A device attached to the system is not functioning.", "The device is unreachable.", "Can't read from the source file or disk", or "The requested value cannot be determined.". What the hell is the difference between them? What does the last one even mean?

EvanAnderson 4y ago
My favorite is the "Unexpected error". You know, because all the other ones are "expected".
- ryandrake 4y ago
  My favorite lately is "Something went wrong". Thank you, error message writer! How is this even a remotely acceptable error description? You might as well just crash.
  - hnuser52395 4y ago
    Yes, exactly. I kept getting a "Sorry, something went wrong" with no error code when trying to give a third-party app permissions with my (paid!) Google account, and the most probably reason was that my accounts were locked temporarily due to suspicious activity. There is no information on how long this will last, there is nothing I can do to fix this, and of course, there is no customer support available. I can't even confirm that waiting will actually fix this, as there is no error code. I thought the people at Google would know better.
- 9dev 4y ago
  Weeeelp… I See both sides of this. There’s some things you anticipate to go wrong, like a disk being out of space, or an API to not respond. Those are the type of things you can (and should strive to!) provide meaningful error messages for. But then, there’s also that class of things that fail in exciting and unexpected ways: a bit randomly flipping in memory, a cable detached in an untimely moment, a missing system library that was there when the program started… you cannot enumerate all things that may fail unexpectedly, hence the only viable solution is to have a special case for those - „Unexpected error“ doesn’t sound wrong from that perspective. Still, it’s completely useless to the human in front of the machine, so there’s that.
  - funcDropShadow 4y ago
    In such cases the dialog box could at least have a button "Show details" which provides the technical error message or code and some context, such that an advanced user has a chance to fix it. To the average noob this will make no difference, therefore A/B testing will select against it. But all the advanced users, admin will keep being infuriated. The useless error messages are still my number one reason to avoid anything from Microsoft.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 4y ago
  Not to the user, but to the program, it can be expecting some errors as natural outcomes of a certain call, while not expecting others. “Unexpected error” basically means “I called a function that threw an exception, but didn’t have code in place to catch it, so it hit some toplevel global exception handler that just aborts the whole thing.”

EvanAnderson 4y ago

My favorite is the "Unexpected error". You know, because all the other ones are "expected".

ryandrake 4y ago
My favorite lately is "Something went wrong". Thank you, error message writer! How is this even a remotely acceptable error description? You might as well just crash.
- hnuser52395 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. I kept getting a "Sorry, something went wrong" with no error code when trying to give a third-party app permissions with my (paid!) Google account, and the most probably reason was that my accounts were locked temporarily due to suspicious activity. There is no information on how long this will last, there is nothing I can do to fix this, and of course, there is no customer support available. I can't even confirm that waiting will actually fix this, as there is no error code. I thought the people at Google would know better.
9dev 4y ago
Weeeelp… I See both sides of this. There’s some things you anticipate to go wrong, like a disk being out of space, or an API to not respond. Those are the type of things you can (and should strive to!) provide meaningful error messages for. But then, there’s also that class of things that fail in exciting and unexpected ways: a bit randomly flipping in memory, a cable detached in an untimely moment, a missing system library that was there when the program started… you cannot enumerate all things that may fail unexpectedly, hence the only viable solution is to have a special case for those - „Unexpected error“ doesn’t sound wrong from that perspective. Still, it’s completely useless to the human in front of the machine, so there’s that.
- funcDropShadow 4y ago
  In such cases the dialog box could at least have a button "Show details" which provides the technical error message or code and some context, such that an advanced user has a chance to fix it. To the average noob this will make no difference, therefore A/B testing will select against it. But all the advanced users, admin will keep being infuriated. The useless error messages are still my number one reason to avoid anything from Microsoft.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
derefr 4y ago
Not to the user, but to the program, it can be expecting some errors as natural outcomes of a certain call, while not expecting others. “Unexpected error” basically means “I called a function that threw an exception, but didn’t have code in place to catch it, so it hit some toplevel global exception handler that just aborts the whole thing.”