Hacker News Reader

Comment by acranox | Hacker News Reader

This sort of goes to something I learned as an auto mechanic. When you have a problem, describe the symptoms as objectively as possible. Don’t say, “I need my tires balanced.” Or you might get your tires balanced but the problem persists. Instead say, “I feel a vibration when driving on the highway at 60mph.” This forces the technician to diagnose the problem.

That’s an overly simplistic example but that’s the point. Tell your doctor what your symptoms are, without including statements that suggest a cause, or otherwise limit the scope of the issue.

View on HN

First step of any technical support case, or just troubleshooting anything is "Define the problem" and that includes when it happens, the circumstances, the circumstances when it doesn't happen, and etc.

One of my first real jobs I quickly became the favorite of some folks on the engineering team. The thing was I was not experienced, I didn't know much, but I followed a simple formula to write up problems, and they liked that. I often missed some basic steps and didn't have experience, but for whatever reason they liked how I gave them information. Also when they asked a question I was very clear and honest with "I don't know" and "I'll find out".

Other smarter techs would make assumptions based on their experience, fiddle with this and then, and then present to engineering this rambling tale that was all about what they tired to fix the problem and didn't fix it.... all while missing what the problem was in the first place, when it happened, and so on.

Not only tech support but also sales.

When I attend trade shows, I often have potential customers come and ask if we sell a particular type of technology. I’ve discovered that really what they are doing is asking if we sell the think they they _think_ is the solution to what they _think_ is the problem. It’s my job to figure out what their problem _actually_ is and then figure out if we have something that can solve _that_ problem.

One has to be quite diplomatic in these situations. They certainly know more about their domain, but I know more about technologies to solve their problem. So I need to pry out more information without sounding like I think I know more about their job than they do.

I like that part of the job.

Nice; the generalized version of "if I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse".

On the other hand, the job often turns out to be knowing the set of problems for which you're selling a solution (which is quite large for some companies e.g. Oracle) and then convincing the potential customer that this is the real problem that they have.

Interesting; this is sort of the flip side of one of the slides here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532360 "Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done". One of the items is "Correct Overgeneralization", which seems to be basically what you describe in the last paragraph. Making assumptions based on experience, but being mostly right. Surely there's some balance to be struck: there's value in experience -- it can help you move faster -- but you have to be able to recognize and question your assumptions if need be. Sounds like your "smarter techs" were missing that step. They didn't circle back after their shortcuts failed them.

Absolutely there is value in experience! I don't want to discount that at all. I was way more productive longer-term for sure. And those techs weren't bad by any means.

The critical points in my example were failing to properly define the problem, and to some extent failure to communicate when engaging engineering created more work, delay, and frustration.

That would be the right thing to do with a competent technician or indeed your doctor. However, here in India where I live, mechanics and computer technicians are for the most part essentially illiterate. They have absolutely no experience with the kind of analytical and critical problem solving skill you describe. Very often I am the expert in the room, and the only thing preventing me from doing the repair myself is the actual tooling (Plus I don't want to get my clothes dirty :-) ). So I do the do the diagnosis, and tell the mechanic what to do and they do it. Works well for all of us. :-)

That’s different then. You aren’t asking for someone to solve a problem for you. You are just paying them to perform a task. I’m referring to the issue addressed in the article about problem solving.

India has exceptionally skilled mechanics. I saw one resuscitating a worn axle by stick welding new metal onto it! (In the street)

Let me guess... Puegeot branded car?

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50A9wjJ40Dk

Oops, forgot this funny add, yes too!

Full context for the other readers: The puegeot 206 have a known axle problem, leading to breaking up right after warranty expires: http://clubpeugeotuk.proboards.com/thread/3298/faulty-axle-o...

It can be solved by directly welding metal to the axes. Considering how popular the 206 is in India, I thouht the OP was also relating his personal experiences with having his Puegeot fixed

*Peugeot (sorry)

Oops, yes.

There are situations, however, where you have to know specifically what you want in order to get it. Using my personal experience with automobiles in Pakistan as an example, maybe 1 in 50 places that's capable of changing a tire also has a good quality balancing machine. If you've just purchased new tires and you know you're going to need all four wheels rebalanced, you have to intentionally seek out that rare place which has a modern digital tire balancing machine and knows how to use it.

Yep, this is generalized as the "standard litany" for bugs reports/request for assistance:

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html

and if you don't provide that you risk to slip on a chocolate covered banana (or XY problem):

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...

This often got me into trouble on IRC. Sure there might be a more elegant way to do it, but I'm learning here!

Curiously I also regularly got into trouble for what I trying to do, not just the how.

For IRC, you need to go through the (only seemingly dated), a bit lengthy, but really exhaustive:

How to ask questions the smart way ... (by Eric Steven Raymond)

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Sometimes a subtle difference in the wording of the question may make the difference from receiving one or more helpful/useful replies and getting some snarky reply.

"subtle difference"

To me, that's hazing. There absolutely are bad questions, but the things that make them bad are rarely subtle.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#examples

>In the last question, notice the subtle but important difference between demanding “Give me an answer” and “Please help me figure out what additional diagnostics I can run to achieve enlightenment.”

Similar to the XY problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

This is true when giving feedback on games too when playtesting! As a designer, I love it when players say "I was frustrated when facing X, and had a lot of fun when doing Y interaction", rather than things along the lines of "I think X is too strong and needs to be balanced by doing W, but I think you should keep Y exactly as it is because it's just right."

Goes for both video and tabletop games. In general it's good to be able to articulate your "root issues" and work your analysis of the experience from there (if that's your responsibility, otherwise leave it to the people whose responsibility it is, the root issues are the only information they need).

This is very much captured elegantly as XY problem:

http://xyproblem.info

I don't think it's simplistic at all. In fact I think it's core to product/requirement management if you're doing it well.

"Tell me what you want to do, not how you want it done."

Or in business with knowing that customers don’t want 1/4” drills, they want 1/4” holes.

Or they want to feel proud their home and show off to friends. Which means getting modern art on their wall, hence requiring a 1/4" hole, and hence the corresponding drill bit.

Let's briefly imagine the world where this thinking is taken to its logical conclusion.

So business thought, why bother with drilling, let's invent Modern Art Affixer, because that's what people really want to do.

(That we can vendor-lock them in this is just an added benefit.)

Then I need a screen mounted on a wall. I can't use Modern Art Affixer, and it's something not common for regular consumers to do, but fortunately there are some (appropriately more expensive) Screen Affixing services that mostly service other businesses.

Then I want to hang a DYI piece of equipment I made and I'm shit out of luck, because individuals doing DIY hardware are too small a market to justify dedicated products.

Coming back from this nightmare - the point is, what happened with the concept of technology empowering people? That is, giving them means to solve their own problems, instead of trying to sell a ready-made solution to arbitrarily specific problem? It's not that I mind very specific solutions - but without more general, empowering technology, we'd be limited to only solving specific problems that affect large enough amount of people to justify a business around it. I worry this already starts happening at the intersection of hardware and software (e.g. most IoT products can be seen as solving overly specific problems to vendor-lock people).

So big thanks to all businesses that keep assuming that what consumers really need are standard-sized drills.

That logical conclusion exercise basically how to suss out, and then create giant scale businesses.

When enough of these exercises in root cause analysis (which is a bad methodology) point to the same problem, and you can monopolize the solution for that singular problem, you have a massive win on your hands.

You have to either trust your mechanic or know enough to avoid getting flimflammed. An unscrupulous mechanic can cost you hundreds in superflous services easily.

This is an entire section of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

You see this a lot in stackoverflow.com

What I see on SO is a lot of really annoying people refusing to answer simple questions because they believe, based on nothing, they know more about the question than the person who asked it.

Never ask them anything about Linux networking. They get so excited to gatekeep the information and tell you that you don't know enough to be safe doing whatever you're doing.

I've actually been super curious lately what happens if you route a PC's localhost to someone else's IP, but I have no clue how to ask on SO without baiting out the obvious "don't do this" and the generic "stuff won't work". Obviously, I could do it myself and explicitly see stuff not working, but I'd like to find out what actually happens under the hood and why things break; SO seems like an awful place for these kinds of "what if" questions and I don't know a better place to ask.

You're curious what happens if you add a route for 127/8 to somewhere other than the loopback interface? Or do you mean making it so that the hostname "localhost" resolves to something other than 127.0.0.1? Give it a try.

what I see on SO a lot is people assuming your question is an instance of the "XY problem" when it's not.

Also the case where for the original asker it really was was an XY instance, but now the top google result for "how do I fill a bathtub using a hosepipe?" goes to a Stack Overflow page full of people refusing to answer the question.

...which was then closed for being a duplicate of another question, even though they are different questions that superficially look similar

Got a link? I can't find the page in Google, DDG or Stack Exchange search using that search text.

I think it was just an example, but now there's this lively discussion about us: https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2018/7/15/...

The thing is, 99 times out of 100 it really is an XY problem. If you're the 1 out of 100 then it sucks to be you; I guess the free advice is worth exactly what you paid for it.

I don't often make that accusation, but the last time I did that's exactly what it turned out to be. They were trying to dive deep into the internals of C++ to find out why their debugger was hanging, and what they were asking for just didn't have an answer. They finally found that they were doing something that led to undefined behavior, and if they had asked about that instead the question would have been answered immediately.

I have ~7k reputation there, that should be a pretty strong signal, but apparently it's not.

The person asking the question above has a 5k reputation. Mine is over 100k so I've seen quite a bit.

When asking "unpopular" questions on SO I usually include a disclaimer along the lines that I want to know the answer for education purposes and any answer that is not specifically addressing the question at hand will get downvoted and never accepted. This works to some extent.

In the end, I stopped asking questions on SO because dealing with this kind of behaviour was too tiresome. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks like that

It heavily depends on the tag.

Some tags have friendly communities that will give a dozen of pointers in the comments.

I see mostly homework problems on SO.

I see mostly lively threads that are closed by moderators as 'offtopic'.

Yes. Don't assume, describe the context and explain the reason for your request.

Good luck with that when contacting Comcast or AT&T.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com