alt Hacker NewsI totally agree with you, I think retries are overused, with the exception of operations that are known to be unreliable and can't be improved.
In my experience, errors which go away within a few seconds are quite rare, and are mainly due to flaws which are usually caught in testing.
I think a very careful cost/risk/benefit analysis should be done when adding automatic retries to things. As well as potentially causing cascading failures, it is a degraded user experience when it doesn't succeed.
As a user I would rather see an error straight away than see many seconds of spinning while something silently retries, and THEN an error.
I have the exact opposite view. Way too often, I’ll be presented with an error to the effect of, “something went wrong, please try again” and often the retry works. And I’m left wondering why this machine whose sole purpose is to automate things can’t do that for me automatically.
In particular, networks tend to be a LOT less reliable than the typical developer accounts for. And the failures are very often transient. A case I run into often is doing something with my phone while leaving the house. There’s a window where it still thinks it’s on the WiFi but it’s too far away for it to work anymore. Initiating an action in that window often produces an alert telling me to try again, and trying again a few seconds later almost always works.