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Why Won't You Answer My Question?

rion.io

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Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us who are good at addressing user-reported issues learn to do the same. No one in our industry seems much to teach this skill. I wonder why.

> No one in our industry seems much to teach this skill. I wonder why. It's pretty simple. In a company of any size, customer support is a separate job from development. Asking a programmer to field support calls is like asking an architect to trim grass.

Yet, if they did so perhaps the architect would stop putting grass in places where it's too f'ing difficult to actually maintain properly. Sometimes putting the 'expert' in the shoes of the 'maintainer' works wonders toward creating designs than can actually be maintained.

Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?

#112
post #9

Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose. I'm constantly baffled by bug reports I receive. From other people who work at my company. A tech company. A large one. You've heard of it. We log every operation in our API. I cache errors, and the API returns a JSON formatted error with a GUID that correlates to the operation that failed, so if I have a GUID I can look at exactly what happened every ste…

Hah. You think most techies want to get informative error reporting from their users? This is the email I sent to my hosting company a couple of years ago when WHM (a component of cPanel) started doing something silly that broke my SSHD: sshd and ip whitelisting - there's a bug it seems If I go to whitelist my current ip in whm, it asks me to restart sshd to make the changes stick. If I do that, sshd fails to restart…

Oh oh time to commiserate. I reported a software problem with a QNAP NAS to their tech support. I dug out the logs (that weren't included with their 'official' diagnostics tool, these were logs somewhere deep down in an undocumented directory for which you had to set an environment variable for them to actually be generated). Those logs included stack traces from their Python code, complete with the name and description which essentially said 'socked timed out'. I described why the issue was happening (including links to the documentation of the 3rd party service they are integrating with, as well as quotes from tech support of that 3rd party company saying what the issue is). I then went on to describe how to reproduce, and under which circumstances it can be reproduced; complete with a high-level conceptual description of how things fit together.

The response? 'Could you please send a video showing when the problem happens'.

bangs head on desk

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