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> They’re smart enough I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have

• Groxx 18d ago
  One of my favorites is spending nearly 10 minutes trying to get someone to read a single word on their screen correctly, in a dialog box that was blocking them, containing fewer than 10 words, so I could find the cause of their problem. After nearly 30 minutes to figure out that they had a popup blocking them, and not "the computer doesn't work". What eventually worked was getting them to spell it to me backwards. That strategy has worked out quite well in other cases too - I suspect because it avoids some of people's built-in autocorrect and dyslexia (autoincorrect). (I honestly mostly enjoy tech support, and I've done it for many years, sometimes professionally. But some people do seem like lost causes, and are not just having a bad day)
  • jiggawatts 18d ago
    The flip side of this is the pleasant surprise of working with a near-retirement age grandma who assures you that she "isn't technical" and "doesn't know how to use a computer", but will studiously write down every keyboard shortcut on little post-it notes and add it to their collection like they're porcelain cats she found at the Sunday markets. I've watched some of these people operate a computer in a manner reminiscent of watching an F1 driver at work, the screen just a blur as their fingers dance over the keyboard.
    • Groxx 18d ago
      Absolutely, the ones that are clearly trying more than make up for the rest imo, and some are stunning. There are a lot of them. And many of the rest are just having a bad brain day and need help rubber-ducking to see the thing right in front of them - we've all been there, many times.
    • the__alchemist 18d ago
      This sounds like "Smart person who has little technical experience and might have cognitive decline from age". The world is fully of people who's intelligence is legitimately lower than you might expect.
      • brabel 18d ago
        > The world is fully of people who's intelligence What an example of a sentence a person *whose intelligence is lower than you might expect would write. I can only imagine this was intentional.
        • the__alchemist 18d ago
          Could you clarify? Are you using the typo as this basis, or something else?
          • mkl 18d ago
            I'm not the same person, but probably. There are at least two errors in the quoted fragment, though personally I don't think either is especially indicative of a lack of intelligence.
          • brabel 18d ago
            There were 2 typos in that sentence (the one I didn’t mention is “fully” instead of “full”). Talking about intelligence in such a sloppy manner sounded like a joke to me.
            • the__alchemist 17d ago
              Ah sry - phone typing
              • bogdanoff_2 17d ago
                This makes me think of "we're all just temporarily abled". This proves the point -- sometimes we're just typing on our phone, lol
  • JimDabell 18d ago
    I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.
    • OJFord 18d ago
      That's even worse than the "I'm getting an error when I ..." type! ("...ok... What's the error?")
      • deleted 18d ago
        [deleted]
      • foxglacier 17d ago
        [flagged]
        • OJFord 17d ago
          The person I replied to described their frustration with a colleague dismissing an error message without reading, not a user. I'm not shaming users not providing clear actionable feedback with stack traces and reproduction steps. I've known fellow software engineers throw their hands up and ask for help because they're 'getting an error', that's what's annoying (because they should know better, ok what have you done before asking me, etc.) not users.
    • silvestrov 17d ago
      I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was. It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube. If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?
  • jsrcout 17d ago
    I was always soooo tempted to say "pretend I can't see whatever you're looking at right now..."
  • leonidasrup 17d ago
    [flagged]
  • gblargg 17d ago
    Reminds me of how people learning to draw/paint are told to flip the subject upside-down, to bypass their interpretation getting in the way of seeing.
• Jach 18d ago
  There's a selection effect here in that smart-enough users won't bother contacting support if they work around an issue on their own, or if something is actually a non-issue for 99%+ of the user base. The ratio of usage and support contacts can be monitored. I fear a lot of devs develop unproductive mental models of the user purely from a minority sample.
  • carlosjobim 17d ago
    Designing for the stupid users also makes life easier for the smart users. No matter what you are designing. It makes your product better.
    • matkoniecz 17d ago
      Sometimes, not always. It may result in power users losing some features.
      • carlosjobim 17d ago
        Sure, but whenever you can make life easier for those who have are having hard time without making life harder for those who aren't, you should do it. For example, no power user benefits from having to use work arounds to make a product function. It's an annoyance to them, and it's an insurmountable obstacle to others.
        • matkoniecz 12d ago
          Oh, I agree with that. Just dispute claim that any improvement for newbies is improving things also for experts.
      • DrewADesign 17d ago
        Not necessarily. Interface design is a communication medium. A skilled designer can often communicate to multiple types of users solving different types of problems. When an interface is “dumbed down,” it’s usually because a non-designer was trying to ‘clean it up’ or make it pretty by removing what they didn’t need and ignoring what everybody else needs. It’s difficult, and that’s why it’s a distinct field with its own degrees and professional programs.
• eru 18d ago
  > I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better. In the 2010s Mathworks, the company that makes Matlab, had a policy that everyone started in frontline support. Including developers. (They probably still have this policy, I don't know.) It shaped attitudes and cultures quite a bit.
  • Xymist 17d ago
    The shaping isn't necessarily productive, though. My company has a policy wherein a the dev team are on a rota to assist the support team (and by extension clients) with technical queries. The net effect has been to make me hate customers with a passion usually reserved for opposing political regimes and childhood bullies.
    • pixl97 17d ago
      >The net effect has been to make me hate customers So what every support person lives thru on every day of work. And really being a good support person involves figuring out what bucket the customer belongs in. "Customers that are smarter than you and if they are talking to you, your shit is wrong somehow" "Customers that are smart in general, but need some guidance accomplish more complex tasks" "Customers that aren't very smart, but handholding works to solve their problems" "Customers that are dumb, realize they are dumb, and persistent at being dumb" and finally the worst "Customers that think they are smart and are belligerent if their intelligence is questioned as they are doing something horrifically stupid"
    • eru 17d ago
      Oh, I don't think MathWorks has a regular rota. As far as I remember, You do your duties when you join, and then you are free.
• IsTom 17d ago
  I wish it was just users. I once had to explain to a PM on client's side for 10 minutes that no, the software can't split $1.00 into three exactly equal invoices and we need to put that remaining $0.01 somewhere. In the end it seemed like he's given up without understanding the nature of the problem and escalated to have someone higher up to tell us to add it to the last invoice.
• DrewADesign 17d ago
  Well, software doesn’t exist for its own sake, the sake of the people that made it, or the sake of some kind of exclusive smartypants club. The purpose is to solve problems or accomplish tasks for people— some of whom are not cognitively gifted. A good interface will take everybody that needs it into account, including people that need less handholding if the usage is different enough.
• steveBK123 17d ago
  > there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough The average IQ is 100, half of people are below that. Being surprised that customers may be of different intelligence is the kind of thing that comes out of people who have never had to work a retail/restaurant job in high school growing up. If someone has made it that far in life before finding this out, they've lived in a bubble. People of varying intelligence levels can operate a motor vehicle and yet software can't be designed well enough for them? The failure may be on the SWEs.
  • DrewADesign 17d ago
    The thing is that good interface design is basically invisible, so most people, developers notwithstanding, take it for granted. In the late 90s, there were entire books published on using popular email clients like Eudora, but a literal child can figure out how to use, say, fastmail entirely through feature self-discovery, and fastmail has more features! I also think the ego stroking borne from disproportionately high labor demand has given many developers a serious case of main character syndrome.
  • HappMacDonald 17d ago
    There exists a floor to how "idiot-proof" Motor vehicles are since they do require a skill test and a licensing protocol to legally operate that do weed out some number of humans not competent enough to operate them (and even beyond that insurance qualifications can weed out some more: crash or commit infractions too much and you lose and/or get priced out of your ability to legally drive). And rightly so due to the unique hazards that they pose: but for want of those things one may easily still have to try to support their software for users incapable of gainfully handling a motor vehicle. Automobiles and the international road network have also had well over a century to standardize themselves over a glacially slowly changing set of expectations while we're writing drivers for 400GBE chipsets that only got invented last Tuesday and building agent management harnesses for styles of neural networks that literally weren't even a twinkle in the milk-man's eye yet as recently as fidget spinners being in style.
    • steveBK123 17d ago