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by epriest 4109 days ago
I originally wrote this when I worked at Facebook. The intended audience (who were submitting these reports at the time) was professional software engineers.
2 comments

As a professional software engineer I can confirm that many of our rank have some sort of blind spot when it comes to error messages.

Many time someone has commented "I don't know why this build is failing!", and a quick search for "Error" in the build log reveals the exact cause.

My current pet peeve is an error message that reads "This application requires <dependency A>. <Dependency A> can be installed from <url>". If I had $1 for every time someone said "I don't know how to fix this".

That's quite funny. I read the headline and thought "OMG, nobody at HN needs to hear that message, comeon!"