7 ms·
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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoAbsolutely, 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 agoThis 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 agoCould you clarify? Are you using the typo as this basis, or something else?
- mkl 18d agoI'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 agoThere 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 18d agoAh sry - phone typing
- bogdanoff_2 17d agoThis makes me think of "we're all just temporarily abled". This proves the point -- sometimes we're just typing on our phone, lol
- steveBK123 17d agoCognitive decline from age is something the SWE community also neglects to think about. You may feel superior to the average IQ person right now, but we're all going to regress to that point & worse at some point. Design software & plan your life accordingly.
- JimDabell 18d agoI 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 agoThat'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 agoThe 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 18d agoI 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 18d agoI was always soooo tempted to say "pretend I can't see whatever you're looking at right now..."
- leonidasrup 18d ago[flagged]
- gblargg 18d agoReminds 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.