Yeah man I have mad respect for IT. I’m a developer but my coworker and I also provide support for our application (it’s internal only). I’m always blown away by the stupid tickets that web developers themselves open — like bro you couldn’t bother to open the developer tools in the browser to see the network response or JavaScript exception or whatever??

Ok sure but having your solution to the problem require a user to use a mouse and keyboard instead of their normal interaction of “tap badge to kiosk” is pretty shit.

But I mean why work a job that’s computer-based if you’re scared of computers? That’s the part I don’t understand: businesses just have zero requirements for office work. I think places should at least just check that candidates/employees have minimum tech literacy (what is a file?).

I guess it's the same thing that makes some people freeze up when they see any math problem, and just assume it isn't something they can handle. 😃

It is absolutely this, in my opinion, and for the same reason as Maths. It pretty much applies to any and all specializations that intersect in our average lives.

A reasonable person might read a medical journal describing the exact set of symptoms they're facing, but being reasonable, they rightfully acknowledge they lack the expertise required to utilize that information and apply it, so they seek a professional.

Another human being who they have been conditioned to believe has dedicated a special amount of effort (and often also characterized as possessing extraordinary traits that allowed/empowered said special effort to work for them in this arena) to the pursuit of mastery in a discipline that they themselves believe they do not have the inclination/ability/time to achieve.

I.e. They go to see a Doctor.

This is the pattern, and for something like medicine, it is both very true, very apt, and very neat and straightforward: Not everyone has the baseline capacity/capital/time/what-have-you to get through Medical school.

Now extrapolate that to "advanced mathematics", and it remains largely true. It does take a very discrete set of parameters to produce a master Mathematician that not everyone has.

But the pattern starts to break down the more granular you get. Not all specializations are created equal, the world has changed, and many aspects of complicated disciplines have ever increasingly intertwined with our daily lives.

Mathematics still works for the next example, but it's time to get back to coding and error messages.

Computer Programming can be a vast and deep discipline, and has a lot of the same baggage as Medicine.

Especially in the minds of those who were born and experienced significant portions of their lives before computing made up more of our lives, and those who were born after computing was commodified down to interfaces that do not require all that expertise.

That leaves us with people, who are stuck interacting in/with systems they conditioned to believe would be beyond them to understand, and they always need an expert.

The joke of course, is that we're all humans within the same capacity bands, and there's as much room between complete ignorance and adept usage, as there is between adept usage, and total mastery.

But most don't dare take that step out of ignorance, they don't think they can be Masters, so what's the point of just being Adept, and that's assuming they even know or believe adepthood is possible.

So instead of reading the error message and thinking back to their interactions with the system and trying to fashion some sort of working model...

They just ping the computer guy.

I appreciated this joke in a way that would have been easily mistaken for hostility in person

grok: I didn't understand your request, so I've sent some nude pictures of little girls to your email account

Welcome to our life as IT service personnel.

Had a client with strange esoteric issues. Clients supposedly locking up and not giving any response except your mouse. After a minute or so the computer regains consciousness and work can continue.

They let it happen, just restarted the computer (like duh, of course it will most likely work once the computer is back) and not give back any information.
No employee knew any specifics of the other.
It was like talking to complete individuap strangers.

Which is why, always also log to file.

Right but in this specific case if I just didn’t show that there were no credentials configured then I’d be yelled at for it “not working.”