Why Won't You Answer My Question?
Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You&#x27;ll lose.<p>I&#x27;m constantly baffled by bug reports I receive. From other people who work at my company. A tech company. A large one. You&#x27;ve heard of it.<p>We log every operation in our API. I cache errors, and the API returns a JSON formatted error with a GUID that correlates to the operation that failed, so if I have a GUID I can look at exactly what happened every step of the way, and what went wrong, in the logs.<p>Most of the time, all I need to fix a bug or tell you why you&#x27;re having a problem is the GUID from the error message. You don&#x27;t even need to ASK a question. I log <i>stack traces</i> of any exceptions that occur so our logs are almost as good as running the software through a debugger.<p>The bug reports I&#x27;d expect and want?<p><pre><code>  &quot;Hey, I got this error message that I copy&#x2F;pasted below...can you tell me what&#x27;s going on?&quot;

  &lt;two line error message&gt;
</code></pre>
I have NEVER gotten that bug report. The bug reports I get?<p><pre><code>  &quot;Hey I think your system is down.&quot;

  &quot;Is something wrong with your system?&quot;

  &quot;I tried to do something and got an error. Is something wrong? No, I don&#x27;t know what the error was.&quot;

  &quot;We&#x27;re getting this weird error when we try X. I dunno, it was just weird. It works now though.&quot;

  &quot;I think the data you&#x27;re returning is wrong.&quot;
</code></pre>
Or my favorite:<p>&quot;Hey, we&#x27;ve been discussing this issue we&#x27;ve had with &lt;upstream system&gt; that depends on your system. We assumed your system has been down for the last couple of days and have been blaming your team in email threads you&#x27;re not on because &lt;upstream system&gt; isn&#x27;t working. Nobody told you or your team. When is your system going to be fixed? No we don&#x27;t have any examples or any record of error messages from your system.&quot;<p>(Resolution: problem is bug in &lt;upstream system&gt;)