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by tzs
32 days ago
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In the particular case of SO what is annoying is that even if the person who posed the X question really did actually have a Y problem and responders figured that out and solved Y, that doesn't help people who really have an X problem who come there later. When people who really have an X problem find that every SO answer to X questions is an XY answer and try to ask a new X question clearly stating that they have looked at all those other questions and none of them answer X...their question gets quickly closed as a duplicate by the idiots that moderate SO. |
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I have worked in IT support and the problem is that the vast majority are problems of users who won't read even the most basic instruction, error message or hint. That means two things (1) users suck at describing their problems ("My account does not work" which could mean anything from a full network fail to them having forgotten their password) and (2) actual technical problems where something really is the fault of the tech are the minority of cases.
This means when someone says their account doesn't work that could mean anything from the utterly absurd like their laptop being broken, over hardware failure (broken patch cable), all the way to actual technical problems like their email address containing an umlaut and being parsed wrong, and it wasn't a problem till the last update. Since the dumber reasons are much more common your issue will stay at the dumb level until you convinced someone it needs an actual technician to look at. And the best way to skip to that level quickly is to do your homework, make sure the rest of the reasons aren't it and communicate clearly what is working and where things fail and how that failure presents itself. Basically by not coming across as one of the dumb reasons as much as you can.
In my whole IT support time I have probably received one well-written request.