One of my top 5 pet peeves in IT: humanizing software.
I use Teams for work and I actually think it could be classified as malware
Notice all the information you get so you can resolve the issue…
The infantilization of error messages annoys me to no end. Sure Error: exception FF02345A0 in module flarghbhgy.py is not immediately helpful, but at least it allows me to search for a solution or a cause. Recently though, a frighteningly large portion of software developers decided for some reason that Oopsie poopsie, someone made a boo boo is a better error message, especially if it’s accompanied by a cute whimsical image of a kitten or some shit…
I don’t mind a whoops somebody fucked right up error message if you let me click a button for more details. Or at the very least, give me a reference number I can tell somebody about. Some “software companies” don’t even properly log things on their end so nobody can solve shit.
A lot of this came out of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think which a lot of dumb UX people took to the worst extreme to be like “dumb idiot user should only get one button ever”
The power button?
OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!
Please pay $200/hour for exclusive access to our Indian support drones who can’t help!
I will put this error verbatim in one of my projects
“it” being ketamine
The other one instantly visible here: nondescript error messages that make it impossible to fix. ‘Something went wrong’.
And then the troubleshooting steps are like reset the app, reset your account and if that doesn’t fix it reinstall Windows. If it still won’t work, buy a new computer.
It’s terrible, just give me the info I need to figure out the root cause. It’s probably very easy to fix. Instead of the ol’ nuke it from orbit approach.
And it’s not just on the side of consumers either. More and more people are using docker to run shit and just reset or reinstall whenever an issue pops up. Sure that’s often faster and it might work, but it won’t prevent the issue from returning and you won’t have learned anything. I learned the most from fixing broken shit. It requires you to figure out how it should work and what’s preventing it from working like that. We are making ourselves dumber this way.
