That's a kind, caring, compassionate, empathetic approach founded on assuming good faith.
Unfortunately, it is perhaps not an ideal fit. I was mostly not dealing with the most junior and new of developers here. I was often dealing with senior developers who fully understood that they were responsible for investigating their own issues in a context where it was understood that troubleshooting takes time.
I often wound up regurgitating the error message back to them, asking them to point to the problems in the documentation getting in the way of them solving their own problems. This generally resulted in a conspicuous silence and the issues shortly thereafter being resolved.
The lesson I drew from this was not that the developers in question needed training. What I learned was that they needed to be convinced to treat these errors as natural-language strings they could interpret themselves.
Unfortunately, it is perhaps not an ideal fit. I was mostly not dealing with the most junior and new of developers here. I was often dealing with senior developers who fully understood that they were responsible for investigating their own issues in a context where it was understood that troubleshooting takes time.
I often wound up regurgitating the error message back to them, asking them to point to the problems in the documentation getting in the way of them solving their own problems. This generally resulted in a conspicuous silence and the issues shortly thereafter being resolved.
The lesson I drew from this was not that the developers in question needed training. What I learned was that they needed to be convinced to treat these errors as natural-language strings they could interpret themselves.