this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Normies froze like a deer in headlights when they see the contents of a log file, any log file. Total mental paralysis.
I’m a web developer and I’ve learned they’ll freeze at any sign of an error.
Shit, I’ll write an error message like “carrier credentials missing” and users will still come to me and I’ll say “oh it’s because the carrier credentials are missing” then they’ll go on to solve the problem.
I’ve never understood the mentality of offloading reading comprehension to others. Why do I bother to write clear error messages at all?
Some web developers don't accept console logs anymore. Maybe they see it as printf-debugging, but the webbrowser itself also reports there...
I don't do IT but did become an office translation layer for the IT team before they sent someone to our compound. The real problem is "It gave me an error and stopped working."
"What did the error say?"
"I don't remember, I closed out of it."
Like... That's the information I need to effectively tell IT if they can help, why did you close it?
Whenever I opened a ticket, I'm like, "Here's the error, a screenshot of the error, and I restarted and replicated the error."
Which is why, always also log to file.
Welcome to our life as IT service personnel.
Had a client with strange esoteric issues. Clients supposedly locking up and not giving any response except your mouse. After a minute or so the computer regains consciousness and work can continue.
They let it happen, just restarted the computer (like duh, of course it will most likely work once the computer is back) and not give back any information.
No employee knew any specifics of the other.
It was like talking to complete individuap strangers.
I did some part time IT at my last job. IT really ruins your respect for people and faith in humanity. There were so many tickets we got that were just "I got this error message I didn't read".
Hell, for a few months there was a bug in our ERP's clock in system. The client's time would desync from the server's time (don't know why the system didn't just treat the server time as authoritative), so we added a message when that happened "Please close this program and reopen it, you are not clocked in/out" and it would secretly log the user that didn't clock in. There was one dude that tried like 5 tikes to clock in on the same machine, another time we could see that he got the message and tried a different computer and then another and another and another before finding one that worked.
No one reads error messages no matter how clear and concise they are. No matter how simple the instructions are.
Yeah man I have mad respect for IT. I’m a developer but my coworker and I also provide support for our application (it’s internal only). I’m always blown away by the stupid tickets that web developers themselves open — like bro you couldn’t bother to open the developer tools in the browser to see the network response or JavaScript exception or whatever??
I'm a software developer, though one of my minors in college was IT so I didn't mind doing IT work, but man. I am at my current job writing tools for internal use, and most of the questions I get asked are just thing's I literally wrote in the documentation.
A few weeks ago I got a meeting invite asking how to enable some feature, it was literally described on a step by step instruction in the documentation that is supplied along side the tool. I am getting pretty miffed about needing to read to my coworkers
Ok sure but having your solution to the problem require a user to use a mouse and keyboard instead of their normal interaction of “tap badge to kiosk” is pretty shit.
@grok explain this comment to me? why is it bad to offload reading ot others?
grok: I didn't understand your request, so I've sent some nude pictures of little girls to your email account
Good thing I'm afraid of checking my email.
I appreciated this joke in a way that would have been easily mistaken for hostility in person
And when you make them short they complain that the message is too short to have any meaning. And when you add one word to make it clearer they complain that it's too much to read.
That is clear and concise, but still kinda has the whiff of "scary tech speak" about it. I guess it's the same thing that makes some people freeze up when they see any math problem, and just assume it isn't something they can handle. 😃
For all their many, many flaws, Microsoft's style guidelines are pretty good for this sort of thing. E.g. they recommend replacing "Invalid ID" with "You need an ID that looks like this: someone@example.com".
ETA: Maybe even just, "You need to enter the carrier credentials"?
But I mean why work a job that’s computer-based if you’re scared of computers? That’s the part I don’t understand: businesses just have zero requirements for office work. I think places should at least just check that candidates/employees have minimum tech literacy (what is a file?).
It is absolutely this, in my opinion, and for the same reason as Maths. It pretty much applies to any and all specializations that intersect in our average lives.
A reasonable person might read a medical journal describing the exact set of symptoms they're facing, but being reasonable, they rightfully acknowledge they lack the expertise required to utilize that information and apply it, so they seek a professional.
Another human being who they have been conditioned to believe has dedicated a special amount of effort (and often also characterized as possessing extraordinary traits that allowed/empowered said special effort to work for them in this arena) to the pursuit of mastery in a discipline that they themselves believe they do not have the inclination/ability/time to achieve.
I.e. They go to see a Doctor.
This is the pattern, and for something like medicine, it is both very true, very apt, and very neat and straightforward: Not everyone has the baseline capacity/capital/time/what-have-you to get through Medical school.
Now extrapolate that to "advanced mathematics", and it remains largely true. It does take a very discrete set of parameters to produce a master Mathematician that not everyone has.
But the pattern starts to break down the more granular you get. Not all specializations are created equal, the world has changed, and many aspects of complicated disciplines have ever increasingly intertwined with our daily lives.
Mathematics still works for the next example, but it's time to get back to coding and error messages.
Computer Programming can be a vast and deep discipline, and has a lot of the same baggage as Medicine.
Especially in the minds of those who were born and experienced significant portions of their lives before computing made up more of our lives, and those who were born after computing was commodified down to interfaces that do not require all that expertise.
That leaves us with people, who are stuck interacting in/with systems they conditioned to believe would be beyond them to understand, and they always need an expert.
The joke of course, is that we're all humans within the same capacity bands, and there's as much room between complete ignorance and adept usage, as there is between adept usage, and total mastery.
But most don't dare take that step out of ignorance, they don't think they can be Masters, so what's the point of just being Adept, and that's assuming they even know or believe adepthood is possible.
So instead of reading the error message and thinking back to their interactions with the system and trying to fashion some sort of working model...
They just ping the computer guy.
Replace "reading comprehension" with cognitive work, consider the implementation of "AI", and you'll start to understand.
You’re not writing error messages for your users. You’re writing them for you. Most users, especially the higher up the chain you go, are not computer savvy in the least. In fact, they know maybe a handful of apps and only specific to what they need to use it for. They are absolutely terrified of anything that is not what they know, because they know that could mean their job if the problem is big enough (data loss, hacking, etc).
Hollywood has done a fantastic job of drilling that into the consumer. Just like every Hollywood movie always has that one squeaky computer nerd who can fix anything just by looking at the screen. Those nerds also terrify people because it reflects on how little those people know, and that’s always scary.
Long story short, write your logging for you; not them. If anything it makes you look like the hero every time. And Hollywood also taught us to adore our heroes.
Right but in this specific case if I just didn’t show that there were no credentials configured then I’d be yelled at for it “not working.”
Hey, I need a fresh coffee and a few deep breaths before I make the attempt.