The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 3. Errors and Warnings

“PC Load Letter?” What the @#$! does that mean?

Michael Bolton

Staring at a malfunctioning printer, uttering this line, Michael Bolton from the 1999 movie Office Space skewered the technology industry for its poor error messages. In fairness to HP, the old LaserJet printers’ screens only had a limited number of display characters to work with. Today we have emerged from the Stone Age and have high-resolution screens to display more text. Think of all the helpful words you can fit!

Consumers are regularly confronted with diagnostic errors and warnings that they don’t understand, and professionals waste hours acting on confusing messages instead of accomplishing their tasks. Users are often a “flight risk,” meaning they might be turned off from our product at the slightest friction.

Yet, we engineers often treat errors and error messages as mere “edge cases” to be implemented as quickly as possible, rather than as a key element of our craft and a way to differentiate our products.

A fun error, more specific to programming, comes courtesy of the text markup system, LaTeX. LaTeX is a document typesetting language and system, useful for beautifully rendered mathematical and scientific papers.

In LaTeX, if you type this, wherein \\ tokens are newlines:

This is some text. \\
This is at the end of a block of text. \\

This is the start of a new paragraph

You’ll receive this gem of a warning:

Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph on line 2.

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