3 ms·

Have you ever written software? Do you know what the acronym WFM stands for? Do I cringe every time I shrug sheepishly at the person in charge of customer servi

Have you ever written software? Do you know what the acronym WFM stands for? Do I cringe every time I shrug sheepishly at the person in charge of customer service? My company's software is used by millions of people and man do they run into some of the most esoteric shit that we cannot produce in the lab. Once I got lucky and my sister's off-brand Android was displaying an edge-case bug we weren't even sure was real. Side-loaded a severely over-logging build and finally found the sucker. Special iTunes build just means it dumps logs faster than... Never mind. The images that just popped into my mind weren't where I thought that was going as I typed it.

dietrichepp 10y ago
I am guessing WFM=Works For Me, in case anyone here is wondering.
- themartorana 10y ago
  It does, and I do cringe when after days of troubleshooting it's the best I can come up with. It's an exception, not the rule, but it happens.
- dmoy 10y ago
  Yup. Also yup, customers will have the weirdest fucking edge cases on your software. Maybe not xkcd/1172 weird, but definitely out there.
Aloha 10y ago
We do this for customers all the time, customer has a special hardware/software setup, so we will send people out on site to diagnose odd hardware problems.
seandougall 10y ago
Exactly -- the broader the user base, the more likely it is you'll run into people with really bizarre and difficult-to-replicate issues. I've seen our main product grow from nothing to an industry standard, and darned if we aren't still seeing bugs crop up that had gone undetected for years.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  People have been grumbling on blogs about this for some time -- google trends for "apple music deletes library" spike for about the last year or so. Wasn't it posted on HN? Given Apple's original, incredulous response to Vellum (see links elsewhere in this thread), its 'known issue' status, the seemingly tepid response up-until-now, and the amount of time they have had to solve this most arrogant of bugs, my money is on the their appearance being some bright-eyed PR fix. I'd bet Apple's management doesn't give a shit about your files when they compete against Apple's pay service. Edit: and good lord people! Empathize with me long enough to think about how, possibly -- just possibly -- someone might have a different interpretation! This is about tardiness and arrogance, not an insult to engineering. Sheesh
- gambiting 10y ago
  We get crash reports for our games on PS4 - there's one type of crash we got a few thousand reports for(out of a few million users, so statistically it's almost nothing). The callstack on that crash seems to be literally impossible, so we contacted Sony about it - they said it can only happen if the user's hard drive is damaged/corrupted. But there is no way for us to tell, so as far as the customer is concerned, it's our game that is crashing.
cortesoft 10y ago
A similar problem occurs even when you control all the hardware. I work for a company with tens of thousands of servers, and the number of strange things we run into is crazy. The exact same software running on the exact same hardware, and sometimes it just behaves differently. We like to think that computers behave perfectly predictably, but so much randomness goes on.
- rachelbythebay 10y ago
  Two threads, on one processor, out of dozens, out of hundreds of thousands of machines. Those two threads would do exp() in the wrong direction, somehow, but only with a certain byte pattern. A byte pattern that corresponded to some floating point number we used in a few places. On that machine, everything using that library would stall. But only when it ran on that processor. Everywhere else, it was fine. And yeah, it sucks. And it happens all the time. Computers are hard.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  I've had bugs relating to EMI issues crop up in testing before. The device in question had a compressor mounted inches from the touchscreen. It turned out the EMI from the compressor would generate phantom touch input on the display. It looked like a bug until I added a bunch of debug logging to the device. Even if the computer is behaving predictably, the environment can do a wonderful job of making it go haywire.
  - cortesoft 10y ago
    Yeah, we sometimes forget that computers are physical machines that can be affected by their environment.

dietrichepp 10y ago

I am guessing WFM=Works For Me, in case anyone here is wondering.

themartorana 10y ago
It does, and I do cringe when after days of troubleshooting it's the best I can come up with. It's an exception, not the rule, but it happens.
dmoy 10y ago
Yup. Also yup, customers will have the weirdest fucking edge cases on your software. Maybe not xkcd/1172 weird, but definitely out there.

Aloha 10y ago

We do this for customers all the time, customer has a special hardware/software setup, so we will send people out on site to diagnose odd hardware problems.

seandougall 10y ago

Exactly -- the broader the user base, the more likely it is you'll run into people with really bizarre and difficult-to-replicate issues. I've seen our main product grow from nothing to an industry standard, and darned if we aren't still seeing bugs crop up that had gone undetected for years.

tomc1985 10y ago
People have been grumbling on blogs about this for some time -- google trends for "apple music deletes library" spike for about the last year or so. Wasn't it posted on HN? Given Apple's original, incredulous response to Vellum (see links elsewhere in this thread), its 'known issue' status, the seemingly tepid response up-until-now, and the amount of time they have had to solve this most arrogant of bugs, my money is on the their appearance being some bright-eyed PR fix. I'd bet Apple's management doesn't give a shit about your files when they compete against Apple's pay service. Edit: and good lord people! Empathize with me long enough to think about how, possibly -- just possibly -- someone might have a different interpretation! This is about tardiness and arrogance, not an insult to engineering. Sheesh
gambiting 10y ago
We get crash reports for our games on PS4 - there's one type of crash we got a few thousand reports for(out of a few million users, so statistically it's almost nothing). The callstack on that crash seems to be literally impossible, so we contacted Sony about it - they said it can only happen if the user's hard drive is damaged/corrupted. But there is no way for us to tell, so as far as the customer is concerned, it's our game that is crashing.

cortesoft 10y ago

A similar problem occurs even when you control all the hardware. I work for a company with tens of thousands of servers, and the number of strange things we run into is crazy. The exact same software running on the exact same hardware, and sometimes it just behaves differently. We like to think that computers behave perfectly predictably, but so much randomness goes on.

rachelbythebay 10y ago
Two threads, on one processor, out of dozens, out of hundreds of thousands of machines. Those two threads would do exp() in the wrong direction, somehow, but only with a certain byte pattern. A byte pattern that corresponded to some floating point number we used in a few places. On that machine, everything using that library would stall. But only when it ran on that processor. Everywhere else, it was fine. And yeah, it sucks. And it happens all the time. Computers are hard.
jschwartzi 10y ago
I've had bugs relating to EMI issues crop up in testing before. The device in question had a compressor mounted inches from the touchscreen. It turned out the EMI from the compressor would generate phantom touch input on the display. It looked like a bug until I added a bunch of debug logging to the device. Even if the computer is behaving predictably, the environment can do a wonderful job of making it go haywire.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  Yeah, we sometimes forget that computers are physical machines that can be affected by their environment.