this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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My #1 pet peeve is when someone comes to me with a problem, and the solution is in the fucking console output or error message.
On a bad day, if I had unilateral power, I would fire those people on the spot.
At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It'd stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.
Developers were constantly pinging slack about "why is this test broken??". Most of the time, the error message would be like "Never found an element matching css selector #whatever" or "Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away". There'd be screenshots and logs, and usually when you'd look you'd see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.
We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there's a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.
I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, "why is this test broken?". I'd say "What did the cat say?" They'd say "What cat?" And I'd know they hadn't even looked at the error message.
There's a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It's weird.
I got handed the keys to the network monitoring suite many moons ago. I immediately started editing the default alert actions to display relevant information, and in some outlier cases escalation procedures.
Most times, it was ignored. Other times, it was skimmed and half-followed. A few people outright refused to do anything differently than they had before (kick it up the ladder).
Glad to be rid of that place.
i think that guy works for us now :D
the best bit is he pings multiple senior devs in slack separately.
so we are all wasting our time doing the same shit in parallel for the same muppet.
Big brain move from the Muppet
Another reason why I don't want more copilot and chatgpt to beginners
Same here. For some fucking reason reading is so damn difficult
Hey I got this error what do
Inc write-up for telling them to follow the instructions in the error message.
to be fair you couldnt read the error in that situation
Minecraft mod users are the worst. They'll post a screenshot of a version mismatch or dependency error that literally tells them how to resolve it and ask "hey, this mod isn't working, how do I fix it?"
Yes but they are 12
I figured that shit out when I was 12 and there were way less learning resources about it on the internet then. Fuck 'em. Someone who never has to solve their own problems without handholding is someone who will never learn to solve problems, period. IPad kids are scared of error messages and that's their problem. They've never had to troubleshoot anything before.
Though I can't blame the kids entirely. Most error messages in the modern era absolutely suck nuts. Half of them nowadays (at least on the client side) are just
"oopsie, there's been a widdle fucky wucky, sooorrrrryyyyy 💖"
With zero actionable info in it. Not even a distinction of You/We/Your ISP Has Fucked Something Up. I guess they figured (correctly) that the end user wasn't going to read it anyway so why bother, but this drives me nuts when I see it.
To be more fair to Minecraft mod users most of them are middle schoolers
The selective illiteracy gets me: clearly, they can read each other's messages. The text in an error message? Brain shuts off.
tbf the text in error messages very often leads down a rabbit hole of barely relevant context, rather than to the shortest path to getting things to work as you expect them to. Or maybe they just don't understand what the word "deprecated" means or implies.
OTOH you learn a lot while in that rabbit hole, making the next time you research something a little bit easier.
Well sometimes. Learning what deprecated means would probably have very broad usefulness. Learning the ins and outs of the library codebase that generated that error when you're only going to make minor use of it once might not. There's a practically infinite amount of things to learn and we all have finite time, attention, and space in our heads.
Error message: "you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to fix this"
Junior dev: 😵
Sometimes I'll copy paste the error message back to them. Apparently it works better when it's in a text message.
On the context of a node package, I'm pretty sure that "solution" is utterly worthless and doesn't come even close to targeting the same functionality the old code had.
But odds are the one place the library author used that function can be replaced by a completely different functionality that happens to use the suggestion.
It's probably a package with one five line function, and a poor implementation at that.