This is a rant about how so many apps on many different platforms (TVs, mobile devices, computers, etc…) have decided to not actually show detailed errors any more. Instead, we get something along the lines of:
Oops, somehting went wrong. Please try again later
… and then, well, we get to figure out what just happened and what in the world we need to do about it. And good luck with that, since you have no idea what just failed.
Why software developers?!? Why have you forsaken us?
EDIT 24 hours later: I feel like I need to clarify a few things:
I’ve worked for 8 software companies over 30+ years. I know why putting a DB error into the message users see is a bad idea. I know that makes me uncommon, but I still want more info from these messages.
You all are answering as if there are only two ways this can work: (a) what we have now (which is useless), and (b) a detailed error listing showing a full stack trace. I think the developers could meet me half-way.
What I want is either (a) “Something went wrong on the server, you can’t fix it, but we will” or (b) “Something on your end didn’t work. Check your network or restart the app or do something differently and then try the same thing again”. And if they’re blocking me because I’m using a VPN, fucking say so (but that’s a whole separate thing…)
Some apps do provide enough info so I have a clue what I should do next, and I appreciate the effort they put into helping me. I think what I am really ranting about is I want more developers to take the time to do this instead of reporting all errors with “Oops, try again”. (If the error is in their server, why should I try again?) Give me a hint as to the problem, so I have something to go on.
Cheers y’all. Still love you my techy brothers and sisters.
Blanket “99%” statements are unfounded. I have had countless issues I was able to fix through error messages and some without.
Source your claim.
I can’t speak for the other user’s claim, but I’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and have written plenty of error messages. When I write a message like these, it’s specifically because the user can’t do anything about it. I’ll log the error to our internal error tracking systems with actual information about it, then give the user a generic message.
If it’s something the user did wrong, and they can fix it, I’ll absolutely give them a message saying that. Usually I won’t even let a user submit a bad request, but sometimes users will bypass frontend restrictions to submit it, so the server always needs to validate it again anyway. The fact that plenty of users won’t even read the message I write is kind of annoying, but at least the users who do read it will know how to fix it.
I’ve tried sending detailed error messages before, and that invariably results in users submitting support tickets and forum posts for things that aren’t helpful. You learn pretty quickly what kind of messages are helpful and what kind aren’t.
I would appreciate the detailed error responses even if the developers don’t think it would be of use to them.
When a project has unexpected downtime, and they do a postmortem explaining exactly what part of their infrastructure failed, what steps they took to resolve it, and how they will prevent it in the future, that is great.
I appreciate transparency. Of course, to expect this from a large corporations is expecting a pig to fly, but detailed error messages are one more step away from “We are the cloud” and one step towards “We are real people providing a service which operates on server infrastructure consisting of…” Its transparent, down-to-earth, and respects people who do want to see behind the scenes.
One company I used even had a white paper explaining their infrastructure as a whole.
This all may not make you more money, but I prefer this to instead treating me with the bare minimum insight into the inner-workings.
I want you to really pay attention to the last paragraph of my previous comment. It’s the most important part. You might like having more information that doesn’t help you, but that comes at the cost of thousands of useless tasks and posts that all have to be manually closed. It’s not only not helpful to give the user detailed error messages in a lot of cases, it’s actively harmful to a business. It doesn’t make any business sense to tell a user that a cache layer host or a db shard is down. As a developer of these kinds of systems, I’m not going to give extra information that you don’t need just to make a few users happy that they get a peek under the hood if it means hurting our support staff.
How is a user sending a support request containing the information: “Site not working. Error message: A surge in requests is overloading the server. Everyone is being ratelimited.” Any different from them just saying “Site not working.”?
If they were going to submit an issue for a problem that is already known, why would the error message significantly change the difficulty of dealing them?
Because if there’s no error code or specific message, they’re far less likely to submit a ticket. The reason these messages often say, “try again later” is because that is the appropriate action for the user to take.