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If Mozilla can’t get a hold of anyone... 20 years ago Google would have sent someone to Mozilla HQ for a week to work on stuff

OnlyMortal 6y ago
Apple did this when transitioning from CodeWarrior to the GNU chain. Apple had to apply patches to the C++ compiler for the company I was at.
- zerkten 6y ago
  This is surprisingly common for large companies. It often isn't formalized because no one wants to dedicate engineers to going onsite with customers. Often the expert is too valuable to give up, or is a poor choice for customer engagement. If you have a consulting team, they may lack the experience needed, or reputation, that the customer wants. As soon as you send the expert onsite, you will have a challenge not sending them at a later time. This scares off engineering managers from lending their engineers because inevitably they have to fight off the requests. The better workflow is one where you can send a less expensive resource (however you measure it) onsite and have them work remotely with the expert. If you can stick with that you often end up with the onsite person leveling up their skills and the ability to re-engage in a scalable manner. Any engagement needs prep before the onsite, a plan for escalation when onsite, and a disengagement plan.
  - OnlyMortal 6y ago
    It was Agfa in Antwerp. Their guy was very polite but I had to explain to him what was going wrong. I think he was more tech support than anything else. Edit: Apple also had to change the linker for the sake of Macromedia’s monolithic applications. Another story though.
vlovich123 6y ago
This is the problem with jumping to conclusions from a vague excerpt. The vendor is some random anti-virus vendor and if you know what trying to get a handle there means.... > More of a concern was user reports that some antivirus software was flagging all our Universal Binaries as malware, and corrupting the Firefox installation the moment the update arrived. > The software was using machine learning techniques and presumably observed that our combined Universal Binaries didn’t quite look like any other legitimate software it had ever seen before. > Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection.
- rebelwebmaster 6y ago
  It was Cylance made by Blackberry.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    I had an awful experience with Cylance and some open source software I maintained, too-- false positive detections, and they wouldn't fix it.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    Their website is... blech.

OnlyMortal 6y ago

Apple did this when transitioning from CodeWarrior to the GNU chain. Apple had to apply patches to the C++ compiler for the company I was at.

zerkten 6y ago
This is surprisingly common for large companies. It often isn't formalized because no one wants to dedicate engineers to going onsite with customers. Often the expert is too valuable to give up, or is a poor choice for customer engagement. If you have a consulting team, they may lack the experience needed, or reputation, that the customer wants. As soon as you send the expert onsite, you will have a challenge not sending them at a later time. This scares off engineering managers from lending their engineers because inevitably they have to fight off the requests. The better workflow is one where you can send a less expensive resource (however you measure it) onsite and have them work remotely with the expert. If you can stick with that you often end up with the onsite person leveling up their skills and the ability to re-engage in a scalable manner. Any engagement needs prep before the onsite, a plan for escalation when onsite, and a disengagement plan.
- OnlyMortal 6y ago
  It was Agfa in Antwerp. Their guy was very polite but I had to explain to him what was going wrong. I think he was more tech support than anything else. Edit: Apple also had to change the linker for the sake of Macromedia’s monolithic applications. Another story though.

vlovich123 6y ago

This is the problem with jumping to conclusions from a vague excerpt. The vendor is some random anti-virus vendor and if you know what trying to get a handle there means.... > More of a concern was user reports that some antivirus software was flagging all our Universal Binaries as malware, and corrupting the Firefox installation the moment the update arrived. > The software was using machine learning techniques and presumably observed that our combined Universal Binaries didn’t quite look like any other legitimate software it had ever seen before. > Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection.

rebelwebmaster 6y ago
It was Cylance made by Blackberry.
- mlyle 6y ago
  I had an awful experience with Cylance and some open source software I maintained, too-- false positive detections, and they wouldn't fix it.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  Their website is... blech.