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I saw this happen once at work. An engineering manager scheduled a meeting with an internal client to establish a better relationship between developers of an i

I saw this happen once at work. An engineering manager scheduled a meeting with an internal client to establish a better relationship between developers of an internal tool and the users of it. No specific agenda items, just general improvement of the communication. He invited everyone from both teams. He went through some material that he thought mattered. People found that kinda useful, but then there was an open Q&A. One of the users asked when the dev team was going to fix the bug where if you enter data in one place, the system acts like it saved it but silently discards it, so you have to go elsewhere in the UI and do it there as a workaround. The crowd reaction was interesting. One half nodded in agreement; the other half was surprised and perplexed. The bug had been around for literally years. 100% of the people on the client team were familiar with it (probably from being bitten by it personally). 0% of the dev team were familiar. Other than don't assume and if you see something say something, I guess the moral here is that the manager's instincts were right on. That meeting needed to happen. There was some kind of communication barrier that needed to be broken down. I'm not sure, but maybe the client felt the developers were unapproachable or unreceptive or that the organization didn't view them as a priority.

nemosaltat 7y ago
-Across at least 4 versions of iOS, I’ve found that if you start the Personal Hotspot while the Wi-Fi is/was recently connected, potential Wi-Fi hotspot clients won’t be able to connect. -My personal workaround is to turn off Personal Hotspot, turn of Wi- Fi, then turn Personal Hotspot back on. This produces a prompt that asks if I want to `Turn on Wi-Fi` or use `Bluetooth and USB only`. Selecting `Turn of Wi-Fi` resolves the issue. -I’ve been doing this for years. I never thought much of it, until at the end of a recent haircut- My stylist was once again fumbling with her Clover card reader. Usually when this happens, I just pay cash. This time I asked if I could take a look. She explained that the Clover gets internet from her iPhone, but occasionally and inexplicably it disconnects. She said sometimes rebooting the iPhone resolves the issue. -I showed her my work around, and she sheepishly admitted that she’d probably forget. She came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam- age and language aren’t making this any easier. I ended up using stitched together, marked up screenshots to save PDF instructions for her. -Until last week it never occurred to me to report this “bug” to Apple. I can’t even remember how I arrived at my workaround.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Bug reporting should also be quick & easy for it to be effective. The Apple bug report process isn't the quickest. It doesn't help that minor bugs/usability issues like that never get corrected (from my experience) so I've personally given up. I wish they'd repurpose the stupid "shake to undo" to report bugs instead and make it automatically start screen recording, allow you to reproduce the bug, edit the video to hide any PII and then upload that along with system information.
  - jakear 7y ago
    The sceptic in me says that the cost to go through all those reports, even if they were just text as opposed to video, far outweighs the potential benefit they’d get from fewer bugs in the OS. I don’t think very many people will decide to switch to Android based on a buggy iOS experience.
    - dannypgh 7y ago
      Surely it's a computer, and not a person, handling triage of bug reports. At Apple's scale, bug reports are easily ignorable until there's multiple.
  - jonathanberger 7y ago
    I wonder if a new product that would be similar to UserVoice or Fixya could help for this problem. Imagine a site that has elements from the above mentioned and also StackExchange or even the Apple Discussion boards. The input would be people reporting bugs they encounter: is it reproducible? known workarounds? maybe severity ratings. A "page views" count. The output would then be either selling or giving away aggregate reports to vendors, like Apple. "Hey Apple, here are the most important bugs people are reporting. We suggest you fix these first." If anyone has interest discussing this further, get in touch.
    - dwoozle 7y ago
      It’s not like Apple can’t use UserVoice — Microsoft does for some products. Apple just doesn’t need to care about customer feedback very much.
wccrawford 7y ago
I've seen this as well. And the companies I've worked for were fairly small and had good relations across departments. Despite asking for people to report bugs and having processes to make it easy, Customer Service almost inevitably decides at some point that it's too hard or stressful or pointless to report bugs, and they stop. And they give the customers work-arounds instead of reporting the bug. And it goes the right way for a while after a huge embarrassing bug that causes a problem with a major client and the bosses have to scold everyone, and then slowly stops again.
- abraae 7y ago
  Unless the dev team is super responsive, and well resourced, reporting bugs can soon feel futile for support. Then they become susceptible to internal fake news,e.g "I heard someone in Dev say they'd never fix that, it's too hard to test". Or "Dev seem to have a policy of only working on new features". As well, support knows that many bugs go unfixed for years/months, and/or the issues that do get fixed don't seem to make sense (to them anyway). So eventually they stop reporting or pushing for bugs. The next stage after that is that this world view gets propagated outside the company - support (maybe subconsciously) lets customers know that there's really not much chance of this issue being fixed. Then customers get the vibe that the product is not being maintained/ the company's priorities lie elsewhere. In turn the customers talk about themselves and perhaps move that little bit more towards going elsewhere. IMO it's a very dangerous situation and companies should take extremely strong measures to keep a positive mindset in the support team, whatever that takes.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    Reporting bugs is an act of faith. It takes effort, and you have to believe that the effort will be rewarded. If people aren't doing it, it may be because their faith hasn't been rewarded in the past. But, I think customer support people are also trained (somewhat rightly) to shield the rest of the organization from complaints. They view it as part of their job to be the ones who handle stuff so other people can concentrate on other things. Sometimes they just get confused and take that too far. If you're in support, sometimes the people who maintain the product need you to run interference for them. Sometimes they need you to hold them accountable. The line can be a little non-obvious at times.
dwighttk 7y ago
can I have a meeting like that with Apple? I've got some bugs I've even sent a few bug reports, and one of them got a request for more info. None have been fixed though.
- freedomben 7y ago
  Years ago I submitted several bug reports for things that were critical to me. For example on my Macbook Pro, when turning the screen brightness all the way off, the screen would randomly switch to full brightness after 5 to 20 minutes. I would listen to podcasts at night and so wanted the screen off for sleeping (this was before having smart phones with speakers on them). Needless to say the screen suddenly going full brightness was extremely disruptive to my sleep. I started "patching" around it by draping a piece of a dark curtain over the screen at night. It's ridiculous that such a premium (meaning expensive) company who completely owns the entire stack (all hardware and software) would have such a terrible bug, and even worse that they ignored it for years.

nemosaltat 7y ago

-Across at least 4 versions of iOS, I’ve found that if you start the Personal Hotspot while the Wi-Fi is/was recently connected, potential Wi-Fi hotspot clients won’t be able to connect. -My personal workaround is to turn off Personal Hotspot, turn of Wi- Fi, then turn Personal Hotspot back on. This produces a prompt that asks if I want to `Turn on Wi-Fi` or use `Bluetooth and USB only`. Selecting `Turn of Wi-Fi` resolves the issue. -I’ve been doing this for years. I never thought much of it, until at the end of a recent haircut- My stylist was once again fumbling with her Clover card reader. Usually when this happens, I just pay cash. This time I asked if I could take a look. She explained that the Clover gets internet from her iPhone, but occasionally and inexplicably it disconnects. She said sometimes rebooting the iPhone resolves the issue. -I showed her my work around, and she sheepishly admitted that she’d probably forget. She came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam- age and language aren’t making this any easier. I ended up using stitched together, marked up screenshots to save PDF instructions for her. -Until last week it never occurred to me to report this “bug” to Apple. I can’t even remember how I arrived at my workaround.

Nextgrid 7y ago
Bug reporting should also be quick & easy for it to be effective. The Apple bug report process isn't the quickest. It doesn't help that minor bugs/usability issues like that never get corrected (from my experience) so I've personally given up. I wish they'd repurpose the stupid "shake to undo" to report bugs instead and make it automatically start screen recording, allow you to reproduce the bug, edit the video to hide any PII and then upload that along with system information.
- jakear 7y ago
  The sceptic in me says that the cost to go through all those reports, even if they were just text as opposed to video, far outweighs the potential benefit they’d get from fewer bugs in the OS. I don’t think very many people will decide to switch to Android based on a buggy iOS experience.
  - dannypgh 7y ago
    Surely it's a computer, and not a person, handling triage of bug reports. At Apple's scale, bug reports are easily ignorable until there's multiple.
- jonathanberger 7y ago
  I wonder if a new product that would be similar to UserVoice or Fixya could help for this problem. Imagine a site that has elements from the above mentioned and also StackExchange or even the Apple Discussion boards. The input would be people reporting bugs they encounter: is it reproducible? known workarounds? maybe severity ratings. A "page views" count. The output would then be either selling or giving away aggregate reports to vendors, like Apple. "Hey Apple, here are the most important bugs people are reporting. We suggest you fix these first." If anyone has interest discussing this further, get in touch.
  - dwoozle 7y ago
    It’s not like Apple can’t use UserVoice — Microsoft does for some products. Apple just doesn’t need to care about customer feedback very much.

wccrawford 7y ago

I've seen this as well. And the companies I've worked for were fairly small and had good relations across departments. Despite asking for people to report bugs and having processes to make it easy, Customer Service almost inevitably decides at some point that it's too hard or stressful or pointless to report bugs, and they stop. And they give the customers work-arounds instead of reporting the bug. And it goes the right way for a while after a huge embarrassing bug that causes a problem with a major client and the bosses have to scold everyone, and then slowly stops again.

abraae 7y ago
Unless the dev team is super responsive, and well resourced, reporting bugs can soon feel futile for support. Then they become susceptible to internal fake news,e.g "I heard someone in Dev say they'd never fix that, it's too hard to test". Or "Dev seem to have a policy of only working on new features". As well, support knows that many bugs go unfixed for years/months, and/or the issues that do get fixed don't seem to make sense (to them anyway). So eventually they stop reporting or pushing for bugs. The next stage after that is that this world view gets propagated outside the company - support (maybe subconsciously) lets customers know that there's really not much chance of this issue being fixed. Then customers get the vibe that the product is not being maintained/ the company's priorities lie elsewhere. In turn the customers talk about themselves and perhaps move that little bit more towards going elsewhere. IMO it's a very dangerous situation and companies should take extremely strong measures to keep a positive mindset in the support team, whatever that takes.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  Reporting bugs is an act of faith. It takes effort, and you have to believe that the effort will be rewarded. If people aren't doing it, it may be because their faith hasn't been rewarded in the past. But, I think customer support people are also trained (somewhat rightly) to shield the rest of the organization from complaints. They view it as part of their job to be the ones who handle stuff so other people can concentrate on other things. Sometimes they just get confused and take that too far. If you're in support, sometimes the people who maintain the product need you to run interference for them. Sometimes they need you to hold them accountable. The line can be a little non-obvious at times.

dwighttk 7y ago

can I have a meeting like that with Apple? I've got some bugs I've even sent a few bug reports, and one of them got a request for more info. None have been fixed though.

freedomben 7y ago
Years ago I submitted several bug reports for things that were critical to me. For example on my Macbook Pro, when turning the screen brightness all the way off, the screen would randomly switch to full brightness after 5 to 20 minutes. I would listen to podcasts at night and so wanted the screen off for sleeping (this was before having smart phones with speakers on them). Needless to say the screen suddenly going full brightness was extremely disruptive to my sleep. I started "patching" around it by draping a piece of a dark curtain over the screen at night. It's ridiculous that such a premium (meaning expensive) company who completely owns the entire stack (all hardware and software) would have such a terrible bug, and even worse that they ignored it for years.