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Comment by michannne | Hacker News Reader

I do support along with my usual dev work and interface with users daily. I can't count the amount of times I've heard "I'm pretty sure it's because of..." followed by something completely unrelated, along with a stubborn resolve to not try the professional's recommended solution

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That's exactly what I try to avoid. I try to focus on the facts as they present themselves. Computer is hot, fan is running full speed, process X is hogging 90% of CPU resources, and to not offer what I think the problem is (because I might be wrong or there's some nuance I'm not aware of). I assume the people who manage our tech know its idiosyncracies, but at the same time I don't want them thinking it's because I keep every browser tab I've ever opened running at the same time.

Well, that goes both ways. My wife is a social media editor and former web editor, so she is not a technician but she knows browsers more than her average colleague. Whenever some internal application has issues, she has to go through the same 10 minutes of explanations that it must be Firefox's fault, every time she calls tech support, after which they agree that it is usually what she suspected the issue to be; or if she had no clue and all she could tell them is "I have tried both Firefox and Chrome" guess what, it's not Firefox vs. Chrome.

I think I’m about 50/50 on thinking their solution is absolute bull and being right, and having made a retarded mistake and their solution solving everything.

This seems like a very scalable sane default presumption, in any case.

Do you find that developers, system administrators and other IT professionals (the typical HN crowd) are just as guilty of this?

Or they give you a log snippet and fail to say _what_ log it came from. Context, people!

A screenshot of part of a log snippet. Followed by "can I phone you?"

Dear users everywhere: the point of the exercise is not to prove there is a problem. I believe you when you say there is a problem. I need enough context to understand what the problem is.

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