Willing to bet that the backend that they are using doesn’t actually give any useful error messages.
Why use many words when few do trick but for system logs.
Would they surface that to the user anyway? That’s something to log, not to tell the client that xyz service failed because of error 123.
I hate this attitude. Yeah don’t give the user stacktraces on error but if you give it a meaningful headline and go in detail, experienced users will be able to deal with the problem if possible. If you go Microsoft-error of mystic ways you will have people Google “unexpected error e34566xce” and they will see that it has 10 possible reasons so you don’t know what even went wrong.
Anyone who says error codes shouldn’t bubble up to the user are incompetent. Either because an incompetent PM infantilizes their users, or more likely because incompetent teams don’t/won’t take an extra 10 minutes to do proper error handling (and they suffer from this as well since they’re the ones who spend hours deciphering the result of a
try {} catch(_) { error("we did a fucky wucky uwu") }
).
If all the corporations can just stop trying to be cute in their error messages, that would be great. This is literally worse than “ERROR: Unknown Error” because this goes out of its way to taunt you while still giving you no actionable information.
I see nothing wrong with it
How can the client know the back end issue
And
What’s the point of giving it to the end user
Any fix would be the user contacting the company and the error code is there. Follow ups would be a traceroute
I can just imagine something in the middle being like
`We couldn't log you in because ${getReason(e) || 'the network failed to do its network thing'}.`
Sounds like a “temporary” error message.
Had the displeasure of using the modern EA app the other week – completely refuses to launch my copy of Jedi: Fallen Order in the foreground after a single play-session (Steam -> EA just doesn’t work for some people).
Looks up error EC10005…
“Network failed to do network thing”
Ok…
Tbf if the client fails to reach the server, there isn’t much more detail they can provide. At least it brings a little levity
All my error messages are haikus.
We couldn’t log in.
Net didn’t do network thing.
Please try again soon.
Keys not aligning,
Username, password astray,
Entry gate stays closed.