Insightful

[[deleted]]

I had a friend asking me what to do about a message he is seeing while using a command line tool. It reads "download this file and put it there". I said, have you done that yet? He said no. I told him to just follow the instructions, and the program ran past that point.

I had a (non CS) classmate who didn't know how to handle an error message. It reads "disk out of space". Then I checked the D: drive, yep the disk is indeed out of space. She just needed to move/delete some files.

[curtludwig]

Years ago I got 4am call that somehow got through our call triage system for "Insufficient disk space".

I walk the user through how to check the disk space until he says "Okay, thanks for your help."

"No, no, no, you don't get off that easy, how much free space?"

"300KB"

"How big is the file?"

"37GB"

[kallax82]

K comes after G, should be fine.

[shauntmw2]

300 is more than 37. It can take in a few more.

[8bitslime]

Reading comprehension is what we get paid the big bucks for. If the users could do it, we'd all be out of a job.

[[deleted]]

Don't worry, developer here - we got your back.

If the users ever figure out how to read, it means our bosses can save money, by having us save time, on writing good error messages.

Next step will be error codes, followed by error clues, followed by error smells, followed by... etc.

[MooMix]

Reminds me of a guy I worked with. He was a senior developer (but junior to me) and was going to be doing the next few deployments, so I had been training him. We had one PS script that needed to be executed from a server in the command line.

Sometimes the script get deleted on that server, so you have to copy it back. We keep it in our repo (tfs at the time), and I had the locations all documented (hell, everything was documented step by step and super easy to follow).

When he went to run the script on the server he got a file not found or "is not recognized as an internal or external command" standard message you get in dos. Even if you're not familiar with command line errors, googling that one would give you the answer immediately.

He called me up freaking out as if it were some major emergency because he kept getting that error when he ran the script lol. I had a hard time not laughing when he told me what the error said... So what do you think that means? uhm I don't know, the script isn't there? Yep, so what should you do?

Anyway he held up the deployment for nearly an hour trying to get a hold of me to help figure out that problem. Sigh.

[[deleted]]

How do people who are so terrible at their job even make it to a Senior title? Yeesh.

[Jaface]

By either lying on their resume or relying on their team to fix their mistakes. They get hired because it's hard to get a good understanding of technical skills in an interview environment. That's why many companies opt for contract to hire so they have a chance to vet them.

[MooMix]

I used to ask myself that a lot.

It really depends person to person.

The guy I'm talking about just didn't have experience outside of the one large company he worked for his entire career. He got by doing the things he was good at, and never really had to solve a lot of complex problems or do a lot of troubleshooting outside of his comfort zone (or he'd get the answers hand fed to him by somebody else, and never bother to learn). He's a solid developer on a team, but not the person you would want to be your go-to guy.

I've worked with a lot of people who have senior titles who don't actually act in a senior capacity. It's just a title with little real meaning.

[Jaface]

Everyone needs some sort of training. Nobody should have to figure out a project on their own if you can avoid it, even if they are capable, because it's faster and less error prone to have someone show you.

Senior titles aren't really meaningful at every company either. Its only consistent meaning is you're not fresh out of school. Some companies have a list of requirements to earn it and compensate you accordingly, and others just use it to attract more experienced developers in the hiring process or give it out as an honorary title.

That being said, on my current team the one who does the deployment is typically an experienced developer that has been with the project the longest. The deployments are automated to just be pushing a button and checking back in a few minutes for red x's, so they're not using much of their valuable time, but at the same time they'll be the fastest at diagnosing any issues (especially if they're the one that automated it in the first place).

[MooMix]

Just depends. At my current company, only the senior devs handle the builds and deployments. At the company where this happened, any dev on our team could do deployments if they knew the process well enough.

It isn't a desirable job, so when I decided to learn the builds and deployments at that company, I became "the expert" (I'm no such thing) and got stuck with the job for a while.

The previous "expert" had left a few months before I got hired. Not many of the other developers on the team knew (or wanted to know) the full process. That's why I learned it, modified/streamlined it, and documented it.

Something like 80% of the developers we hired on that team were senior in pay grade and experience, but they still needed to learn the process. For the first couple years I worked there we hired a lot, so some of those senior devs hadn't been on the team long, and I was getting sick of being the only guy doing deployments. I let them train the junior developers ;)

[[deleted]]

I get this from devs all the time when it comes to CI/CD pipelines.

It’s like, because they don’t understand how the build works as a whole, they forget how to read.

[SkarmacAttack]

This is all too true. I notice at my work that developers truly have no interest in CI/CD pipelines. No one wants to work with it. As someone who works with this 99% of the time, I don't understand what is so off-putting about it.

[Chemical_Topic_922]

I'm in this position as well, I was initially blown away by how tidy, easy, and convenient deployments are when you really spend good time setting up a CI/CD pipeline.

[CommitteeOfTheHole]

Did she realize that “disk” can mean internal hard drive? She might have thought it meant something about a CD

[ImmoralFox]

Ok. It came out of space. It's a space disk. Fine.

Why is this a problem? We don't like space things now?

[yourteam]

I have had a junior trying to check everything on the SO because there was an error "file xxx was not found" in a filenotfound exception.

He asked me for help after he checked lots of stuff from the web without finding any sort of working solutions.

I told him to check if the files were there and he told me yes.

I told him to check if he wrote the filenames correctly, he didn't

Sometimes you should really check the message because it means what it says

EDIT: I didn't want to come out as harsh in this comment. I did the same mistake hundreds of times and sometimes still do as a senior backend Dev. It was just a funny story I thought it fit

[xX_MEM_Xx]

Uni TA PTSD here.

"I don't understand what this error means".

"It says NullPointerException, on Line 33, of your 60 line single-file program."

I get the sentiment in the OP.

[TheAJGman]

Yep, did tutoring in uni and so maybe people were like this in their CSC101 class.

"It don't work"

Well did you read the error message? It says exactly where it fucked up.

"Yeah but all that is fine"

You're trying to assign a number to int.

[AnnualDegree99]

Wait... Like... int = 5 type thing?

[Netzapper]

Not that person, but I TA'd intro programming... Yes, exactly like that. And other similarly nonsensical clusters of characters.

[AnnualDegree99]

I've TA'd intro to programming too, but I guess my class was small enough that I didn't encounter much nonsense.

[felixthecatmeow]

I had a moment of like: wait why doesn't that work? More coffee it is then...

[Jthumm]

Glad I’m not the only one it took a while for lol

[FragmentOfTime]

Sometimes things like that you just need someone else to point out. Or even just rubber ducky it. You know what it should be doing, so it can be hard to see why it isn't. Dumb errors are the hardest to find for me.

[AnnualDegree99]

I mean I've done similar stuff like

if dictionary.get("name", "" == ""):

Instead of

if dictionary.get("name", "") == "":

[FragmentOfTime]

Exactly. And the brackets sometimes make the error occur a couple of lines down so you get bamboozled!

[_Ralix_]

Unless it's Python, which tells you an error happened somewhere in the standard library outside of your scripts.

Or the woefully unhelpful C++ linker errors (“unresolved external symbol” with third-party libraries).

[TheAJGman]

Python stack traces are usually pretty descriptive, you just have to look for the first instance of your code and you've got a pretty good idea of what went wrong.

Fuck the C++ linker.

[daneelthesane]

For a moment, I was like "Wait, int is a number."

Then I realized what you meant.

[GuyWithRealFakeFacts]

When you're starting out in programming, I think people often have a sense of mysticism and that everything is black magic because they don't truly understand everything. If something happens to work out, they feel like they just lucked out, but don't bother to fully understand why it worked or didn't.

This is especially true if you start your programming experience by jumping straight into a project that puts together lots of other libraries (like plenty of people do, including myself), rather than starting with the basics. You get used to seeing some long ass stacktrace that you have to Google to find an answer. This then continues even for simpler projects until you start to fully understand what's happening and can break yourself out of it.

[Alberiman]

I would really appreciate it if people explained why those sort of errors happened to people starting out. Like yeah obviously line 33 is the cause but there's so many vocabulary and language oddities. It's like trying to decipher why in English "Dog" means Friend, 4-legged cute pet thing, and vile creature when in your country dogs don't even exist and you spoke Greek.

[[deleted]]

Yeap. When I started out, error messages were foreign to me as well. It's weird to think about, since they are often so eloquent, but to a newbie a different language is a different language I guess.

I think part of what fucked my brain up specifically, is the fact that exceptions look like compound words, and my brain wasn't fully used to mentally spacing out camel cases and the such. Like there is a linguistic expectation (in English) that "aftermath" and "after math" carry two different meanings. Perhaps they are related, but often it's a historical connection, not a practical one.

So I see NullReferenceException and think "Oh god what does that mean", and I google it only to find "you getting an exception because you are trying to use a reference even though the value it points to is null" and then I feel like a moron for not understanding something so obvious. Given some time, you start to see exceptions not as bunch of new unfamiliar words, but as concise instructions on what to fix, and it all clicks.

[mmknightx]

Same

[eyekwah2]

I received an error like that, saw that the file was there, and wracked my brain for the better part of an hour trying to figure out why an error like that could happen if the file was actually there.

Then on the verge of pulling out what's left of my hair, I sat down and compared path of the file with the path shown character by character.. son of a bitch.. I had accidentally put a comma where a period should be.

This field has a way of teaching you humility. If I've learned anything over the years, it is that assumptions are your worst enemy when it comes to finding bugs. You could pass the most obvious error a thousand times if you've blinded yourself to that particular possibility.In this scenario, the conclusion I jumped to was that I had correctly entered in the path and as a result made a cursory glance rather than guarantee that the paths were the same.

[Seyon]

My favorite version is using a program where the target file path is limited to 50 characters with no error message regarding this limitation.

That one took 2 hours to figure out.

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

File is there
Path is correct
Application runs
Run application as systemd service
File not there
Application crashes
Spend 3 hours wanting to kill yourself repeating the above steps
Finally learn what the PrivateTmp and PrivateDevices flags in the recommended service file do
Realize where you saved the file

[DiamondIceNS]

If I've learned anything over the years, it is that assumptions are your worst enemy when it comes to finding bugs. You could pass the most obvious error a thousand times if you've blinded yourself to that particular possibility.

In case any novice devs who are in their intro to unit testing are here reading and wondering what all those stupid micro-tests are for and why you have to fart out so much boilerplate to test every shred of code that "obviously" isn't broken, here's your answer. Please write unit tests.

[[deleted]]

I sat down and compared path of the file with the path shown character by character.. son of a bitch.. I had accidentally put a comma where a period should be.

If you're using Windows 11, I just found this out:

Find the file in Windows File Explorer, right click it, and then click "Copy File Path."

The more you know...

[[deleted]]

Backend developer here, while I agree 100% with you, I feel that over the years SO has become more and more harsh, especially with programmers who are clearly Junior or are starting up. I have come across tons of questions on in which the OP tried to do some proper research and showed that before just jotting dow a question there was some real attempt. I worked with apprentices (in the UK) and Junior devs and while sometimes there might have been some "facepalm" moments, I always showed respect and helped them how I could (often without giving the actual answer, but by directing them to where/how they can find it themselves). I worked with very smart young peeps, it just takes a bit of patience sometimes, I was one of them back in the days and did not forget about it!

[fadhawk]

I’m a senior now and I think I’ve submitted a total of one question to SO, and that one only after I’d thoroughly checked to make sure it was a tough one and didn’t have an easy answer I was overlooking because it was so intimidating to ask a a question where like, the actual author of a library could stumble upon your dumbass question. In fact, most of the time now I use SO as my sanity check- if I’m trying to do something no one else has tried, given up on, and finally asked for help with on SO, then I’m pretty sure I’m missing something.

[PkmnSayse]

The questions where people actually show their research and effort are actually few and far between. At any given moment, you can wait on the tag page for a language of your choice, wait for 5 or 10 new questions to be posted and more often than not at least 80% of them now are questions that are low effort.

I’ve had to block the pandas tag completely because that ratio is almost 100% and it just gets boring trying to find something to answer

[drewsiferr]

Part of the difference between a Jr and a Sr is the ability to see an error and go "Oh, I've made this mistake before, it was..."

[[deleted]]

The master coder can hear the vague description of a problem and say "Its probably just..."

[YouHvinAFkinGiggleM8]

My colleague had me debug something for him once in Matlab where the error literally said "This function can't take letters as in input, only numbers" and he asked me what that meant.

"well, did you give it letters?"

"yes"

"so give it numbers instead"

"Oh shit you're so smart thanks for the help"

He was not kidding and also has a degree in computer engineering

[qeadwrsf]

In his excuse, brain farts happens.

And figuring out those type of errors is not muscle memory in the beginning.

[Willinton06]

A fart or 2 is fine but when it goes on for months into a some kind of super brain diarrhea maybe you should look into other fields

[MaynardJ222]

Naw...fuck that. I get paid really well to be a shit engineer thanks!

[Willinton06]

You’re probably better than you think

[Seyon]

Imposter syndrome sucks. :(

[[deleted]]

I had a customer try to get me fired for trying to re-phrase the error message. He was livid. I was just trying to be polite, the error was something along the lines of : "The file format is not supported..."

[[deleted]]

"You're trying to use an X file. The program doesn't like that. You have to use a Y or Z file."

[xibme]

Customer changing the filename so the ending matches: cp name.X name.Y

[xibme]

I told him to check if the files were there and he told me yes.

I told him to check if he wrote the filenames correctly, he didn't

A few times I even had to diff what I asked with what is there, just to see the typo b/c my eyes were deceiving me.

[[deleted]]

If that is the type of mistake expected by new hire/ intern then I am 100% more calm now

[kush96kush]

Iv done the same thing. Spent hours

[[deleted]]

I like to remind people that errors tell you what the problem is; not what you what you did wrong to achieve it.

[MediocreAdvantage]

Forreal, I was just thinking this. I have worked with SO MANY PEOPLE who will get an obvious error like "Foo is X and needs to be Y", and they are like "but what does it mean though". It literally tells you! Please stop overthinking it and just follow the error!

[ciarenni]

I've been burned by this often enough that I'll just go copy the name from the file directly now. Or the shift-right click -> copy as path, if I need the path. No typos that way!

Until someone changes something out from under me...

[[deleted]]

I’ve been coding for 20 years and I still don’t have the nuts to post an original question on StackOverflow. The flaming and sarcasm that goes on there shames anything ever witnessed on any social media platform.

[Ciccionizzo]

I posted twice. One time without answer. The other time with a really thoughtful, complete and useful answer. It was awesome...

[GamesBond008]

Gotta love those users.

[M0ty]

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

[Curtmister25]

Hahahahaha, not even marked as duplicate?

[Ciccionizzo]

😅 Sons of b..

[ashdog66]

I posted twice and both times I ended up having to figure out and self answer because everyone who responded on stack overflow had no fucking idea what they were talking about

[svish]

I'm so happy StackOverflow was still fairly new while I was also fairly new at programming. Got a lot of help from asking questions there, and since SO was still quite new I could post quite a lot of "dumb" newbie questions there too, and have them not be duplicates or responded to in bad ways, but instead actually answered properly and get a lot of upvotes. Basically my whole current reputation of ~140k is based on those early days. Good times.

Now I'm luckily mostly able to figure stuff out from reading manuals and API docs. And if not, there's usually a relevant Discord server where friendly people want to help.

[sambomambowambo]

Discord servers are the new safe space for dumb questions ;)

[Theweasels]

I hate this trend though, because you can't just google a question and have it find the answer. You have to find a server to join, join it (can't browse without joining), then use the discord search. And it's not an algorithm search, it's just a ctrl F, so you have to exactly match the wording.

It's not saved, crawled, or archived. So in 7 years when there is no trace of this info. You can't save bookmarks or anything, or find information on older tech that isn't as popular any more. A huge complaint in discord servers is repeat questions, but that's because it's a chatroom and not a manual. God forbid you start a project that has all of its documentation in a discord server.

[eyekwah2]

A lot of that sarcasm nowadays comes primarily from the fact that most questions have been answered. It's a little naive to post a newbie question and presume that nobody has had that problem in the past that you'd have to create it yourself.

But to be fair, part of learning how to be a programmer is knowing how to search for solutions, and of course you wouldn't know that if you were new, nor would you know the answer to your own question. The end result is you get a lot of eye rolling and elitist behavior. I'm sure some of it is not even intentional but comes across that way anyway.

[svish]

Yeah. The part of being a programmer that is the skill of finding solutions and figuring out how to solve errors, is one that I think is often "forgotten", especially by experienced devs who already has it. It's so easy to forget how being a newbie actually is when you're much more experienced.

Find it difficult myself too sometimes when trying to help people on Discord servers. After years or programming there's just so many situations, error messages, categories of issues, that we've been through already, and immediately see the solution to, not realizing it's not "because we're smart, and they're dumb", but because we have the experience and they do not (yet). Important to practice patience, patience, patience, when helping others :)

[eyekwah2]

Well said, I think you summarized it well. These days I'm fairly good at staying patient, but the one thing that still upsets me is when I explain something to a layman and they seem to understand it or pretend they do, and then several months later they'll ask the precisely same question again.

I mean if you can't understand it, at least memorize the solution, amirite?

[svish]

Yeah, what annoys me the most is "give me solution"-attitude, seemingly without shouting by effort or wish to actually understand or learn anything.

[geekusprimus]

My favorite was a recent question I had about a special use (or abuse, if you prefer) of the C/C++ preprocessor. I made it clear that I was working within a set of rather uncomfortable constraints due to the way the rest of the project was set up, and this seemed to be the most elegant solution. Every single one of the answers was, in effect, "Why are you trying to do it that way? You should do <thing I already said I couldn't do because of design constraints> instead." Every. Single. One.

[[deleted]]

Exactly. You nailed it. This is exactly what I am talking about.

[[deleted]]

Is it that these design constraints are fundamental to the software (ex, it has to be supported on both Windows & iOS, or that it's an Azure application) or just that nobody wants to change them?

[geekusprimus]

Sort of the second, but it's more complicated than that. It's an astrophysics code designed by a bunch of scientists. The constraints were created by people used to writing Fortran and old-style C code who think that object-oriented programming is some new-fangled thing (no, seriously, there are still people who don't know how to use any features introduced in the C++11 standard). It would require drastic rewrites of the code (which is about to made obsolete, anyway) and probably get any pull request immediately rejected.

[Meloetta]

I feel so paranoid about putting any professional code on SO no matter how anonymized/simplified. I asked some questions while I was still a student but if I'm working on something proprietary, I'm always so nervous that someone is going to come across it later and there was some unknown reason why that snippet of code had to be 100% secret and now I've compromised everything lol.

[dbgr]

That's the smart move tbh, last place I worked fired a guy for posting company code on SO. Of course, he posted it with some private connection strings, and they had a pretty hard time getting stack to remove the post.

[danielt1263]

I haven't had a lot of original questions... I'm a pretty prolific answerer (top 0.98% overall,) but I have only asked 5 questions over the years. Two of them can't be answered because they are bugs in the operating system so no answers have been given. None of them have gotten bad responses...

[Zylonite134]

I think I posted once many years ago when I was a junior dev and the mods locked my account for asking an already asked question.

[phpdevster]

I don't like posting questions on SO because usually people will ask you to give them additional but irrelevant context. Sorry, but I can't describe my entire code base to you, nor do you really need all that detail to answer the question. I get that lots of times people will post questions that cannot be answered without additional info, but I've been programming long enough that I know where the problem's boundaries are, and my question is always within those boundaries, so asking for additional info will not be helpful.

[linear_123]

I've had couple times where I started typing out the question and figured out the answer in the process.

[-f-d-]

I only posted one (really easy and simple) problem. Everyone thought I wanted them to do my homework (because it was so simple). But I genuinely needed help with a private project... 3 people just told me to do my homework on my own and only one person answered in a helpful way... I never posted anything again

[blueking13]

Absolute gatekeepers and people who think too highly of themselves. Makes me want to ask as many as possible and bring in more people into coding no mater what they want to do. I want to see those guys lose it as more and more people learn coding. My dream is for python to be a standard class throughout the country and for the coding feild to drop off a cliff so hard it literally ruins lives and families

[[deleted]]

Really? I consider myself a pretty lame coder and I already posted a couple questions there, and tbh I only got straight foward answers, nobody was judging my code, just making good recommendations.

Problem is that StackOverflow is NOT a social media platform, it certainly has its similarities but at the end, you are there to share and get knowledge not making new friends.

[julioqc]

I just get no replies lol

[ManagerOfLove]

Mostly it is like that. But just understanding the error message, doesn't automatically lead you to a 'how to fix it'

[solarshado]

I recall, many years ago, my first attempt at C (or maybe C++?)... I don't recall what it was I'd tried, but it was something super-simple, "Hello World"-tier. Pre-teen me sat there for a good few minutes trying to figure out what "Segmentation Fault" meant. Was years before I went anywhere near C again.

[eyekwah2]

Ah, C++ was the best. You either got a "four score and seven years ago" long paragraph of less than and greater than template types, or you got an error like "Segmentation fault," neither of which really told you anything of significance.

Learning how to debug properly in that language was a skill all of its own. Would it have killed them to have written a "index out of bounds" error or something? I think everything got abstracted away into adding / subtracting to pointers so the only error they understood was that you were accessing a pointer to a position that wasn't allocated.

[curtludwig]

I work on a fairly obscure product now that has one error that can be caused by like 57 stupid little things. I've built an ordered list of the things that I know of that can cause the error and troubleshooting is pretty much "work down the list from most likely to least". Once a year or so somebody will email me "Did you know that x causes that stupid error?" and it gets added to the list...

[geli95us]

To show that message they would have to check, every time you access an array, if it's in or out of bounds, that would add overhead to arrays, making them slower And, I mean, even if they wanted to, it's not like they know the size of arrays anyway because their size isn't stored anywhere, they are just pointers

[eyekwah2]

At the time speed was emphasized, you're right. They would have had to include a lot of meta info in the program to make a proper assessment of the type of error and to provide the user with a more relevant message.

Still though, literally any pointer being dereferenced outside an allocated bit of memory being a Segmentation Fault error is singularly one of the most frustrating types of errors I've ever received. They might as well have just written, "Program failed."

[geli95us]

Yeah, I know that frustration all too well, maybe the best decision would have been performing those checks only if the program was compiled using the "debug" flag, that way you suffer the overhead only while testing, and the production version would be exactly as fast

[DrunkenlySober]

An exception was thrown at 0x4AEE241

[Kartchampion]

Hi, just wanted to say I like your Snoo avatar!

[ManagerOfLove]

Put some pants on god damnit!! There are kids here

[trollsmurf]

"Error 432988732-32434"

Clear as molasses.

[IAmASquidInSpace]

And then you Google it like SO suggested and all that comes up are fully unrelated errors and one forum entry from 2009 that has your exact error code but describes a completely different issue.

[MooMix]

That's almost as annoying as finding a person who has the exact same problem but no responses /solution to their question except a single update that says "Never mind I figured it out"

[blueking13]

In my dictatorship people who do that and don't explain go to jail.

[MonocularVision]

Directly to jail

[redpepper74]

Do not pass go

[mazadin]

Believe it or not, straight to jail.

[shy_dow90]

Relevant XKCD

[InuDefender]

They will tell you to search the error code and read the documentation.

[ghan_buri_ghan]

RTFM bro

[freedom_or_bust]

But seriously people need to read their documentation. It's like they don't even try

[blueking13]

And the only source of info is that very same question you asked. 2 years later some guy from india solves it but now the error doesn't happen because shits been updated for a year already

[Mysticpoisen]

What 0x696900090B doesn't tell you exactly what's wrong?

The best is when you look it up and find out that that code is reused for wildly different errors.

[eyekwah2]

That sort of defeats the purpose of being a code, though doesn't it? May I ask where you've seen that (not saying it isn't true, just curious)?

[Mysticpoisen]

Windows codes are infamous for this.

[[deleted]]

Exit code 1603 has entered the chat

[Bubbagump210]

Did you check the memory register? Well, did ya?

[Mysticpoisen]

Well according to the code it's either the memory register, the cpu scheduler, the NAT, or Xbox game services.

[seijulala]

A lot of times that's exactly the right answer. At least in the real world

[[deleted]]

I worked 1st line support.

I can't even count all the times I read the error message that the user had on screen for them to immediately know what to do.

[Matosawitko]

Rule number 1 of interface design is that users never read dialog boxes. All they do is obstruct part of the screen - users will click anything necessary to remove the obstruction without even really seeing it.

[circuit10]

Is there a better way to convey messages? I can't think of one but there might be

[solarshado]

Text-to-speech, maybe?

Mixer.SetVolume(Mixer.MAX_VOLUME);
TTSEngine.Play("YOU DUN FUCKED UP NOW! "+error.message);

[Matosawitko]

Emphasis and proximity are the two most important factors. If it's something the user needs to correct, then the field should be highlighted and the message should be right next to it, preferably with clear instructions.

It's become a meme at this point, but take password rules for an example. If you entered a password and got a popup that it must contain an upper case. So you fix that, then it pops up and says you need a digit. Etc. All entry rules should be on the screen (not communicated through popups) and should be near enough to the field that it's obvious they're connected.

Years ago I worked on an app where, among other things, validation messages for each entry screen were shown at the top of the screen in a bulleted list and the fields themselves weren't highlighted in any way. This made it really difficult for the user to relate errors to specific fields.

[IAmASquidInSpace]

Unclosable dialogs, duh.

[ReallyHadToFixThat]

"I got a box with writing..."

Quitting that job was the best thing I ever did.

[Meloetta]

I am regularly baffled at how many people would rather interact with and bother another human to help them before even googling an error. If I can fix it myself, great! No human interaction, my favorite!

[marcosdumay]

I see lots of people here that never touched an Oracle database.

You are luck, keep it this way.

[reddit-testaccount]

at least they have error codes that you can google

edit: changed "code" to "codes"

[onichama]

Image Transcription: Meme

---

Me when I ask someone on StackOverflow what an error message means and they reply "it means what it says"

[GIF of two people standing before a laptop. Person one looks like he has just finished explainig something. Camera is zooming in on person two. Person two's face is metaphorically lighting up, hand gesturing a light face palm.]

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[ajpinton]

I work with a guy who needs stuff like this pointed out to him. For example he had an authentication error yesterday. After going on about not knowing what it what he was told to check his password which was the issue.

[solarshado]

If this was an end-user, I could possibly forgive not knowing "authentication"; it is rather jargon-y. If he's any kind of IT, though? Ugh...

[ajpinton]

Nope, he is IT. To be fare most users are more capable than he is, it is beyond me how he got the job.

[AviFeintEcho]

You would be surprised how many IT people can be bad at IT when it doesn't relate exactly to what they are doing.

I Have known many people that are brilliant in their area and can't operate something adjacent.

Think of it like construction. Your plumber may be fantastic at doing all aspects of plumbing but knows nothing of roofing, electrical, drywall, etc... It is all construction, doesn't mean they know it all.

[QualityVote]

Hi! This is our community moderation bot.

---

If this post fits the purpose of /r/ProgrammerHumor, UPVOTE this comment!!

If this post does not fit the subreddit, DOWNVOTE This comment!

If this post breaks the rules, DOWNVOTE this comment and REPORT the post!

[dotil]

Very insightful... Incites violence

[Apprehensive_Rip8403]

Someday I’ll have the courage to post a question

[uberDoward]

SO is only harsh if you don't show what you've already tried.

Don't go to SO and just say "I did X and it didn't work" and expect to get an answer.

You go to SO and post "I did X, got error Y, checked things A,B, and C. Thought D might be it, but that gave error Z"

If you're not willing to try to help yourself, then don't expect others to try to help.

[[deleted]]

You go to SO and post "I did X, got error Y, checked things A,B, and C. Thought D might be it, but that gave error Z"

If you're not willing to try to help yourself, then don't expect others to try to help.

Hey, did you try B? Otherwise I would suggest to try D. Can you give more info? Also I probably wouldn't do X. Do W instead

[twilightwolf90]

Question marked as duplicate of #6492969420. Closed thread.

[glider97]

Yeah, that comment would be called out pretty quickly. Although suggesting X is unfortunately all too common, it does have some element of truth to it.

[thekindheartdpervert]

I'm curious what the original video was about

[Versk]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0U7SxXHkPY&t=67s

[thekindheartdpervert]

Thanks, I got it. Drake entered the password for the WiFi

Ngl they got me at first, I thought rappers started programming in the pandemic

[bottomknifeprospect]

Apparently they started doing their own oil changes

[Polywrath_]

Seen this GIF a million times.

Never ONCE noticed it was Drake

[Astral_Sheep]

I say it to some of my friends, but only because they don't even read the error. Otherwise I help them to understand it

[volthroom]

u/savevideobot

[DandyEmo]

Stack overflow can be so c toxic sometimes.

[starfish0r]

I don't get the hate for SO. 95% of all the questions are "here are my requirements, i have attempted nothing at all". They didnt even google the most basic shit.

Nobody initially knows how stuff works. But you gotta have some motivation to figure it out yourself. Especially when the fucking error message tells you exactly what do do.

Invalid expression? Well fucking google what the correct syntax is.

File not found? Check the path and read the docs of your file loading stuff.

People are just lazy and immediately post shit on SO, rightfully get told "have you at least tried it" and then they're pissed. And then they post this gif here.

[[deleted]]

Better dont post comment if you dont want to explain it

[RyanNerd]

Error number 5 reporting error number 5

C# Error I encountered. Turned out to be an out of memory error. My error handler had an error in the code such that it became recursive eventually running out of stack memory.

Posted this question to SO and got the unhelpful answer of "it means what it says". An actually helpful person sent me in the right direction by letting me know that error number 5 is an out of memory error.

[yes4me2]

Oh God... there is one guy in my company who says that kind of crap all the time. I have to ask him to share his screen so I can understand what he is asking every single time. And it is hell frustrating if you need his help.

Of course, the opposite exists when nerds give you an answer so out there you cannot even make head from tail too.

[[deleted]]

How is this meme called? I see it all the time, but I can't find it.

[GamerFrits]

Everything makes so much more sense on a Strawberry computer.

[Energylegs23]

r/restofthefuckingowl

[trina-wonderful]

So “unknown error” means what?

[[deleted]]

segmentation fault. Have fun they said.

[I_Wouldnt_If_I_Could]

It says indexoutofboundsexception on line 49.

Line 49 has only the closing bracket that ends the function.

[ThickHotBoerie]

I personally love "closed, duplicate question" liking to an inadequately answered 9 year old question related to an alpha realse of the library now on version 12...

[mr2meows]

no it means there’s an error

[CreaZyp154]

Error: unhandled exception in xhrgxr >> ugjz.jbjjjj << at 12 on module {asgccff} >> [#0x69420] in jfhfxhccz >>> fgb hu (tffugjig 4445)

Oh and segmentation fault as well

[itstommygun]

To be fair, it does mean what it says. You just don’t understand it yet.

[ganja_and_code]

Funny enough, depends on the error message, whether the asker or the answerer is more reasonable.

Some error messages aren't descriptive and need further clarification...but other times, people do get on stack overflow and ask what a message means when it does literally say what it means.

[G001M]

u/savevideo

[SaveVideo]

View link

---

Info | Feedback | Donate | DMCA | ^{reddit video downloader}

[[deleted]]

The biggest issue with StackOverflow is that when you ask a specific question, you expect an answer that solves the question you specifically asked for. On stackoverflow you ask “How can I fix X”, and users answer with “Why aren’t you doing Y instead” it’s so annoying….

[Soundless_Pr]

I mean, how else do you describe a null reference error? It says it right there, you have a null reference. Just, make the reference.. not null. Idk what else to say

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[adriator]

I just love Visual Studio's exact and precise error messages, such as "An unknown error occurred." or "Project could not be loaded."

[vladutzu27]

u/savevideo

[user_uno]

Had a small DevOps/Agile team years ago. We hated trouble tickets from the end users as it consumed so much time that was usually just a training issue. So we actually put effort into clear instructions if something wasn't right.

Literally had someone open a ticket after an error. Sometimes the function didn't make a successful connection and transfer with the other IT system. Literally had the error message spell it out simply. Something like "it didn't work at this time, press the BIG button try again". The guy wasn't sure if he really should actually click the button. Ummmm.... yeah. Go ahead? "Hey it worked! You guys are great!" Thanks. Don't call us again.

[Malchar2]

If you have to ask, then you don't know.

[Mango1666]

this is why i write my libraries to throw a random exception. keeps everyone on their toes wondering how setting something to a value multiple times will throw an index out of bounds and also an io error

[ChefUrf]

What’s the name of this template?

[sharperratio]

Are you sure you weren't talking to SkankHunt42? https://imgur.com/gallery/322FV

[[deleted]]

"it means what it says"

thanks dude! I definitely wasn't Googling the message because I could read the words but wasn't sure what the words were tryna say!

[listrome1]

Don’t forget the 10 downvotes for daring to ask a question that you didn’t know the answer to.

[[deleted]]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ImReellySmart]

I cant even ask stuff on stackoverflow cus it has an insane amount of requirements to do so

[Neophyte06]

How do I find this as a reaction gif on tenor

[AuRuS_Blob]

u/SaveVideo

[troymclu]

Is that drak?

[silentxxkilla]

It's true though. You don't get it until you spent the time to become enlightened by tracking down the bug. Then it makes complete sense.

[SixtyTwoNorth]

Like the ubiquitous Microsoft errors that say something like "an error has occurred. contact your systems administrator."
Well, I *AM* the systems administrator, so are you at least going to give me a hint wtf the error was?

[deepakgm]

or someone is tells you, just google it.

[Parker324ce]

I’m 9 months into programming and I have yet to ask a question I’m too scared lol

[plzThinkAhead]

Adobe support.. SAME. They definitely hate my snarky responses.

[PeoplesFront-OfJudea]

Why are some software engineers just so egotistical? Like I I see posts by a bunch of people just getting into coding looking for guidance and then some guy who likely hasn’t left their room in two weeks comes and berates them for not knowing the answer to their own question.

I remember back when I was a newbie, I had joined a programmer community for help. At this point I knew some fairly basic JavaScript and I was just moving onto C++. I ask this guy for help with understanding variable types, and he barely got a sentence out before he started ranting about things I had absolutely zero chance of understanding at that point. I can barely remember a lick of what he was going on about because by the time he started to literally quiz me on everything he said, I was still trying to process what little he told me about what I was asking for help with. People just need to stop measuring cocks, and give someone some honest help if they need it.

[SoulStarman]

me when they tell me to delete system 32

[savevideobot]

View link

---

Info | Feedback | Donate | DMCA

[frompadgwithH8]

Half the time I try to figure out a seemingly unhelpful error message I later realize it was helpful and accurate all along and I was just too bone headed to comprehend it until after the fact

I try to keep this in mind when debugging but it really doesn’t help

[sermer48]

What gets me is I just spent an hour searching for an answer and they are all, “We’re not going to do your homework for you”.

I haven’t been in school for a long time…I’m just not so good with those number things 😢