[slillibri]

I suppose, but as someone in infrastructure I have had developers ask very, very specific questions without ever actually providing the context or what they were actually trying to solve. Seems to me to be a variation on the same problem. Just because a question is specific doesn't mean it's the right question.

[mjw1007]

My view is that, whatever is causing developers to often be bad at filling in context, it isn't a deficiency in their theory of mind.

(Similarly, someone elsethread is talking about how their non-developer colleagues neglected to tell them about an upcoming release. One possible explanation is that their colleagues were bad at "theory of mind", and believed that as they knew about the release, so did everybody else. But I think it's more likely that they were too disorganised to make sure that it was somebody's job to tell everyone who needed to know.)

[BurningFrog]

> My view is that, whatever is causing developers to often be bad at filling in context, it isn't a deficiency in their theory of mind.

The "theory of mind" explanation is that those developers don't understand what context other people are probably missing.

I agree that there are of course other possible reasons.

[antod]

I've had the same experience. It was kinda jarring as I expected devs to not fall into the same trap they complain about with questions/requests from their users.