Bug amnesia is very real! As technologists, I feel it is important for us to cultivate the skill of noticing and remembering bugs, because the default seems to be that we apply all of our expertise and faculties to develop workarounds and then we internalize the workarounds and forget about the bugs. This is fine for lone-wolf tasks but leads to all sorts of mismatched expectations in groups.
Installing linux is my go-to example. To the intuition of a typical technologist, it's a trivial and highly reliable task. Whenever I go through the exercise in TFA and force myself to actually pay attention to the places where I must apply expertise to work around issues that would otherwise be extremely difficult to navigate, I usually count around 5 showstoppers and a dozen minor bugs. Things like "the install instructions say to hold down F2 or F10 to get into the BIOS, but per the blink-and-you'll-miss-it BIOS info page it's actually F11 and if you actually hold it down the stuck-key detection ignores it so you have to spam-press the key instead." The world is full of these things and it's easy to lose sight of them if you don't force yourself to remember.
> and if you actually hold it down the stuck-key detection ignores it so you have to spam-press the key instead
Fuck this shit. How many pointless boots I triggered just because I could not manage to get the right key to be pressed at the right time? This is so pointless, so much time lost on this for nothing.
Just show the one key I should press at what time and give me feedback when you understood I wanted to do this.
Now my strategy is to spam the whole Esc + Fn keys row and delete, rinse, repeat until it computes.
Something I really love about thinkpads is that they have that big blue "thinkvantage" button at the top of the keyboard, which is totally tacky 99% of the time, but! when you want to get to firmware configuration, you know what button to hit.
I've seen such a key on a Sony Vaio. The label was nothing but explicit, I actually had to look for help. But the button would turn the computer on, and get to the setup menu. Nice touch. Obviously, it was the only nice thing about this terrible machine but that's a different story.
Installing linux is my go-to example. To the intuition of a typical technologist, it's a trivial and highly reliable task. Whenever I go through the exercise in TFA and force myself to actually pay attention to the places where I must apply expertise to work around issues that would otherwise be extremely difficult to navigate, I usually count around 5 showstoppers and a dozen minor bugs. Things like "the install instructions say to hold down F2 or F10 to get into the BIOS, but per the blink-and-you'll-miss-it BIOS info page it's actually F11 and if you actually hold it down the stuck-key detection ignores it so you have to spam-press the key instead." The world is full of these things and it's easy to lose sight of them if you don't force yourself to remember.