@TechConnectify I have long felt that there is correlation between being able to solve word problems in school and ability to troubleshoot.

Same concept of putting information together, with the added skill of knowing how to get more.

@TechConnectify I really hate how often modern software makes it impossible to find out what caused any problem

@TechConnectify

Hell, yeah.

I feel like curiosity and an interest in seemingly unrelated domains ends up being surprisingly handy in life.

@TechConnectify Depending on the thing being troubleshot, sometimes even the simplest first steps to fix the problem escape me. Especially when it's a piece of technology where 9 times out of 10 power cycling it fixes the problem. I poke at everything else before considering giving it a drop kick. 😵‍💫

@TechConnectify As a career-long cause whisperer, I agree that we don’t know how to teach this and we still should.

Depending on the audience platform, a post like this might get replies like “what’s a scissor lift?” And that’s the level of troubleshooting many people are willing to apply (read: not even bothering to search for a term they don’t understand).

I hope we can figure out how to solve *that* one too.

@TechConnectify Problem solving and critical thinking are two skills that are hard to teach, should absolutely be taught in all public schools, and will almost certainly never be taught.

@TechConnectify my wife has a few days of "troubleshooting" in the analytical chemistry class that she teaches. turns out the instruments they use are broken at least 50% of the time so it's an important skill.

@TechConnectify teaching people how to troubleshoot would bankrupt entire industries

@TechConnectify it can be taught for sure, problem-solving/troubleshooting across many industries/disciplines has been a core competency in Kepner Tregoe's (KT) methods for many years … see https://kepner-tregoe.com/faqs/ for instance

@TechConnectify Increasingly it's difficult to troubleshoot, especially a lot of app-enabled tech. We'd been having problems with a robot vacuum we got for Christmas. It was having problems and kept getting an error where the vacuum would stop and it would make a little tone. The instructions basically just said "if there's an error, check the app for problems" but the app read all clear, even with the robot sitting in the middle of the room undocked. You can't just Google "Roomba D D G chime"

@TechConnectify my work colleagues: "it's broken, let's change ten things, try something (that may not be the same as the action that triggered the issue), then when it causes a different issue, change ten more things without putting anything back. Repeat."...

/me screaming: "please, for the love... before you change ANYTHING, figure out what you did to reproduce the issue".

@TechConnectify So much this.

@TechConnectify https://artoftroubleshooting.com/ is my go-to desk reference for people new to the way of thinking that is systematic troubleshooting.

@TechConnectify I think troubleshooting is a subset of deductive reasoning, and that is useful in many different contexts. I agree it's one of the most practical applications, so it might as well be the 101 course.

And later we get to "discerning what you know from what you assume". Other topics: stating a problem clearly enough for someone else (or yourself) to understand it. Distinguishing correlation from causation etc.

About troubleshooting, always remember: sometimes trouble shoots back.

@TechConnectify years ago (eh late 1990’s) I worked for a Sun reseller and as part of getting certified for Sun’s bigger servers I had to take a series of Sun trainings including a week long course on troubleshooting. It was really excellent - covered a lot of pretty universal techniques (along with some specific to Sun - like how to get root if you have physical access)

For the final day/test we had a room of machines to troubleshoot. One was “sticky tape on a connector”

Another “OS rooted”

@TechConnectify I've never said I have all the answers, I said I know "how" to find all the answers! 😁

@TechConnectify An interesting case study in user experience and error design: if a Linux computer interacts with a real, legacy line printer - which is still possible, because of course it is - it might sometimes display the error message "lp0 on fire." This message was originally written for Linux in 1992 (but still exists today - again, of course it does), but dates back to very early versions of Unix in the 1950s.

@TechConnectify I think the key connection here was your prior knowledge that when a machine spits out a seemingly random number, that's probably an error code. So I think teaching troubleshooting as a skill has to start with teaching people what to look for to get that first lead to follow.

@TechConnectify Troubleshooting is a Critical Thinking Skill. All fine arts teach critical thinking skills, as all fine arts involve problem solving and abstract reasoning. This is one of the reasons we should be pushing for STEAM not STEM in schools.

@TechConnectify I know this kind of a joke but my friend sent this to his Mom and it actually... worked https://xkcd.com/627/

Technology, IMO it can only be taught by example. By starting with something that doesn't work and showing the thought process, or guiding you through it. Watching videos of people troubleshooting and fixing things should also help.

It may also be taught as part of computer science classes because it's exactly the same skill as debugging software, just applied IRL.