Re: Time to ditch "SSCCE"?
- From: "Monique Y. Mudama" <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 18:09:52 -0600
On 2005-10-08, Roedy Green penned:
>
> The thing that frustrates me is to me it should be OBVIOUS there is
> nothing in the post to go on. It is terrifying someone could be so
> clueless or self-centred as not to notice that.
>
> I think the problem is mostly the OP is self centred. People will
> tell you why it is important the poster get an immediate solution,
> how frustrated they are, what crap Java is, ... rather than any
> clues to help someone solve it. I think perhaps they are often just
> so emotionally wound up they forget to provide clues. But on the
> other hand, they rarely provide them when I ask. They seem to think
> others should just magically know the answers without knowing the
> circumstances.
>
I used to work for tech support for a university. Tech support people
have to deal with this kind of problem day in and day out.
At some point, I came across an analogy that I think explains a lot
about why users can't or won't give us useful information.
Imagine you're a computer user. Computers are a mystery to you, and
yet you must use them to do whatever it is that you actually care
about. You imagine the tech support person to have near-omniscient
capabilities when it comes to computers. In your mind, all the tech
support person, who is surrounded by monitors and can pretty much see
everything you're doing anyway, has to do is push the big red button
in order to solve your problem. But first, you have to say the magic
words. Even though the tech support person could solve your problem
at any time, s/he refuses to do so until you've jumped through enough
hoops to satisfy their egos. And so you keep saying things, hoping
you'll say the right thing to trigger the "red button pushing"
response.
I think there's a layer of truth here. Non-technical people see those
who understand and work with computers as having some sort of magical
talent. And then there are all the movies suggesting that "hackers"
can do anything from reading your email to stealing your money, so why
shouldn't someone on a tech support line be able to tell you your
password or even see what your computer is doing? The same probably
goes for people seeking help for programming problems. From their
point of view, you've seen incomprehensible gibberish (a stack trace)
and from there solved a problem, so why wouldn't you be able to solve
the problem with no gibberish at all?
--
monique
Ask smart questions, get good answers:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
.
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