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"please update" is kinda the "try restarting" equivalent for sysadmins. And people get angry because it is usually delivered in a "I have no idea if it will wor
by chillfox 6y ago
"please update" is kinda the "try restarting" equivalent for sysadmins. And people get angry because it is usually delivered in a "I have no idea if it will work" kinda way.
All you would have to do to make people calmly accept that they need to update is explaining why, so you know do the minimum and search the issue tracker so you can tell them that this is actually a known problem that was fixed in version x.y.z and updating will fix the problem.
- loopz 6y agoIf something's broken, upgrading is the Last thing I'm willing to try.
- thu2111 6y agoYeah, but most software updates have so many bug fixes and performance improvements it's unreasonably expensive to give people a justification for each upgrade request, especially when - as noted - customers accept forced upgrades without any notice at all, when something isn't self hosted. I think this is a fundamental issue with the software world: there aren't enough skilled sysadmins left anymore (how many people even call themselves sysadmins these days), so the more options users have the more ways to get things wrong they'll find. The vague, open ended nature of "support" means it ends up being an unsatisfactory experience. When the only people who need support are the in-house devops team, it's a lot easier. Unfortunately there don't seem to be good solutions for this. If users aren't given choices, they may leave or never turn up at all, but once that pain is over they won't be unhappy again (unless you have a major outage). Give them choices and when things blow up they'll become an angry unhappy customer with a support contract, which is every businesses worst nightmare.