Boy who cried wolf in reverse? [LWN.net]

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 13:32 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Boy who cried wolf in reverse? by smoogen
Parent article: Ubuntu 25.10 to drop support for GNOME on Xorg

Maybe it's meant in humour, but it's real.

The other day, my brother-in-law said "Help please; my email's not working..."

I went over to my sister's house. Did not even touch his laptop. I just had to glare at it and the email started working again...

I bet many people who've given tech support have had similar experiences. 🙂

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Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 13:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> I bet many people who've given tech support have had similar experiences. 🙂

I've always heard it referred to as "the consultant effect"

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 16:54 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (2 responses)

A friend in college had the OPPOSITE effect. He would break things just by trying them, when they worked fine for everyone else.

And yes, his first job out of college was in QA...

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 20:10 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

I have that skill too... I am very good at breaking things, which is quite a useful thing in testing/QA.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 21:41 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

IBM allegedly had the "Black Team" - a collection of those sort of people.

Devel;opment teams used to quake in their boots when told their software was being paid a visit by these people.

Cheers,
Wol

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 17:21 UTC (Fri) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a whole bogon source/sink pseudo-quantum-mechanics joke theory around this.

But I don't think anyone did a double-blind mass experiment to search for individuals that really experience significant more issues (or significant less issues) than the median... And I struggle to even come up with a remotely serious attempt at how would one even design such an experiment.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 14, 2025 10:32 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I think this is partly to do with brain wiring.

If the programmer thinks one way, and the user thinks another, then the default expectations won't match. The user won't use the program the way the programmer thought they would. So the user is much more likely to tickle bugs. Throw in the sort of user who also thinks "what happens if I try THIS?" and they can be a nightmare for programmers as they break everything left right and centre.

As a textual person, not a visual, I don't like wysiwyg, and you've heard me wax lyrical about WP's "reveal codes". I hate Word (and by extension lowriter, sorry), because I simply cannot get my head round how it works, so as a result "nothing works" for me ...

Cheers,
Wol