this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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There's just something most people don't think when they say "just read the error" and that's the knowledge you've gathered over the years.
A doctor can read through your test results in 5 minutes and know instantly what's the problem, while you're still stuck googling the first abbreviation
Or doctor looking at console output about killing children, it's not obvious without knowing the context
You are giving end users too much credit.
I get like a half dozen emails a day about "an error message", which I always have to go back and ask what the message actually says
The replies to these are always screenshots, because if it wasn't they may have accidentally read it by mistake
About half the time, the error message is "credit card on file is expired" or "12a-482-223 is not a valid phone number", or some other thing that makes it impossible for me to send an email reply that isn't condescending, but when I just say "it means your credit card is expired", I get thanked for how prompt I was at solving their problem
Yeah, I don't think they realize what a bad analogy this is. Hell I'd argue it's straight up faulty analogy fallacy. Computers are designed to be useable by humans and programmers want users to know the fix to the problem. We've had to reverse engineer how the human body works but the computer and software is man made. The problem isn't your hemocrit is 7.3 it's your credit card expired, this program is in an unusable state please close it and reopen it, your computer needs to update please restart it, the program can't get new messages because the computer isn't connected to the internet.
Use OCR to change it into text and then send the whole error back without the image. See if they notice.
These messages are rarely more than 6 words, so OCR is kind of overkill
If the error requires a developer (me) to look into it, I capture it in the backend - the only messages I pass on to the client are those a 6th grader could understand
I can't tell you how many times I personally have been called to help someone with a computer problem where the error message tells the the easy solution. Close and reopen the program, restart your computer, time to change your password using this easy UI, connect to the internet.
Half the time the error message tells users the exact easy solution to do. Call me when it's the other half.