32 ms·

On the internet, it's really hard to know if the person knows that those parts are wrong and just wants to ask a question, or if they don't know what they're wr

On the internet, it's really hard to know if the person knows that those parts are wrong and just wants to ask a question, or if they don't know what they're wrong and they're going to get tripped up by them. I've also seen quite a few instances where the person needed fundamental corrections for their problems before their main problem could even be addressed, and they absolutely refused to accept those basic corrections first. It makes it impossible to help them with their real problem. The tech support example of this is when the phone tech requires someone to reboot the device before they'll continue diagnosing the problem. I only worked phone tech support for a year, but in that time I had quite a few people who thought they knew better and refused to reboot the device when asked, but when I forced them to do it, the problem fixed itself. When it didn't fix it, I was able to get on with the rest of the diagnosis. When I first took that job, I even let them refuse to reboot. After a handful of times that I couldn't figure out what was wrong because it made no sense, and finally rebooting fixed it, I followed the company line of requiring the reboot up front after all. OTOH, I did believe them when they said they rebooted it already. If they lied about that, it generally caused it to be a very long, frustrating call for them, and my call times were already too short, so I didn't worry about it. (Yes, too short. My call times were low enough that it looked like I might be just getting people off the phone without fixing things, though of course none of my recorded calls showed that happening. My boss literally told me to chat with the customers more.)

jeffwask 4y ago
Everyone should do a rotation in Tech Support.
- warrenm 4y ago
  Especially professional services folks - if you don't know how it breaks (and likely fixes), you have almost ZERO reason to be in the field
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Especially the engineers. They will think twice about building unreliable or unintuitive systems if they then have to support actual customers using them.
  - toss1 4y ago
    YES! Far too many companies treat tech support as a necessary evil trash cost center, instead of the absolute goldmine that it can be. Tech support is a highly concentrated vein of real-time descriptions of things that can, and in many cases must be improved for your product to thrive. Don't ignore it — actively mine it!
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    I hate when I don't see the end user feedback as an engineer. When I see users forced to waste time with elaborate workarounds and hacks to use software I made I feel real guilt even if I had no way to know it wasn't well suited to their needs.
  - cbm-vic-20 4y ago
    And UI designers. And product managers.
Msurrow 4y ago
This is funny. YOU are not wrong. But this answer is the wrong answer. I believe you fall in OPs category no 2. He’s asking for specific forums.. so, you know any? :)
- xtracto 4y ago
  Great reply! I know even news.ycombinator suffers from the issues the OP is listing. My take is that people participating in a public forum WANT to be read (including me with this post!), so you will find all sort of tangent conversations that have nothing to do with the main subject being discussed (like my very comment). What if, there was a StackOverflow like forum which, for a given question ONLY the person who asked could see all the answers, and only the answer they chose as correct/relevant/good would be the one published. That might decrease the noise in different conversations. It's one of the things I liked about the SlashDot moderation system: There was a "-1 Offtopic" flag. No matter how good or interesting your answer was, if it is offtopic it should be marked as such.
  - shagie 4y ago
    > What if, there was a StackOverflow like forum which, for a given question ONLY the person who asked could see all the answers, and only the answer they chose as correct/relevant/good would be the one published. Stack Overflow has recognized that it has significant enough of a problem with accepted answers becoming outdated or just being plain wrong. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/411352/outdated-answers-accepted-answer-is-now-unpinned-on-stack-overflow https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/411352/outdated-ans... As an example, I point to https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/131397/why-use-try-finally-without-a-catch-clause/131400#131400 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1313... which for a long time had https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/131401 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/131401 as the accepted answer. > ... That might decrease the noise in different conversations. While it may, I fear (and having seen this in other places) that this would lead to some entitlement by the person asking the question seeing it as a personal help service instead of trying to build a repository of information. As someone who might answer, the related part would be "I don't want to be waisting my time duplicating work that someone else is doing."
viraptor 4y ago
> who thought they knew better and refused to reboot the device when asked That one is so annoying because it's equally likely that step was put in as a generic "why not", or as a crucial step. Half the software installers will tell you to restart when they're finished even though it's not necessary anymore. Many first level support people will tell you to restart your device when you're reporting their page returning 5XX. It's an issue with the industry conditioning people with BS rather than with customers expecting BS.
- dasil003 4y ago
  BS is a strong word. I would say it’s about bisecting the problem space and rebooting can address a lot of known and unknown states. Heck, just last week I got locked out of VPN on Mac OS due to not being up to date even though the system claimed it was. Guess what I had to do to get the update to appear?
  - viraptor 4y ago
    No, i stand by it. There are situations where you need a reboot, there are others where it's a convenience (we could do a clean service/component registration and restart, but we'll just ask the user to reboot), and there are some "put it in the instructions just in case". Doing that and not actually enforcing the reboot when necessary trained a lot of people to ignore it and I can't blame them.
- warrenm 4y ago
  >Half the software installers will tell you to restart when they're finished even though it's not necessary anymore Methinks you either don't know what is "necessary", assume you know more than the developers of said software as to what is "necessary", or that you know better than OS vendors what is "necessary" Rebooting is simple, fast, and basically pain-free 99.99% of the time It clears memory, hung processes, file handles, and a host of other things - any (or all) of which could interact poorly with whatever software you're installing/upgrading may rely on If an installer wants a reboot, I fully expect the software to likely not work 100% correctly until said reboot has completed
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
On one of my favorite tech support calls, I told the customer to use a different wall outlet. He really didn't want to but finally I said, "can you just humor me please." Then from across the room I hear "oh my god, son of a bitch." Comes back on the phone: "you were right, the outlet isn't working."
- TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
  My friend withdrew money using an ATM. No money came out. He called the support number on the machine. They said "before we proceed, please humor me, put your hand in each pocket, and check the money is not there." The money was there.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
> I've also seen quite a few instances where the person needed fundamental corrections for their problems before their main problem could even be addressed, and they absolutely refused to accept those basic corrections first. It makes it impossible to help them with their real problem. In my experience, order isn't actually that critical. Sure, answering the question they asked won't solve their problem, but it will answer their question. Maybe solving their problem isn't what they want or need. Even if it is, the quickest and most painless way to navigate this social dynamic is to just answer the question they asked, and let them run into the other problems you predicted. This is especially important on StackOverflow (but also important to forums in general), because the entire point is to publish an answer to the question so others can find it later. By answering a person's problems instead of answering their question, you are just leaving more noise for the next person to dig through. Of course, it's still common to stumble about and ask the wrong questions; so how do we reconcile that? I think what StackOverflow is missing is a path for users to answer a question with another question. If we could communicate with the question asker to rephrase their question, then we could have them edit it, and trim the search engine noise for everyone else.
cillian64 4y ago
A while back the wireless charger I use for my phone stopped working, a few months after I bought it. Certain that the charger had died I contacted their support for a warranty replacement. They asked my to reboot my phone and I complied just to humour them. Imagine my surprise when the wireless charger then went back to working perfectly (and has been fine since).
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Similarly, I once called my ISP after first rebooting 3x. They asked me to reboot, I insisted I had already done so, but lo and behold another reboot fixed it. I'm still half convinced they did something on their end and just didn't tell me. If they didn't, they've got another "stupid user lied about rebooting" story on their hands.

jeffwask 4y ago

Everyone should do a rotation in Tech Support.

warrenm 4y ago
Especially professional services folks - if you don't know how it breaks (and likely fixes), you have almost ZERO reason to be in the field
Nextgrid 4y ago
Especially the engineers. They will think twice about building unreliable or unintuitive systems if they then have to support actual customers using them.
- toss1 4y ago
  YES! Far too many companies treat tech support as a necessary evil trash cost center, instead of the absolute goldmine that it can be. Tech support is a highly concentrated vein of real-time descriptions of things that can, and in many cases must be improved for your product to thrive. Don't ignore it — actively mine it!
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I hate when I don't see the end user feedback as an engineer. When I see users forced to waste time with elaborate workarounds and hacks to use software I made I feel real guilt even if I had no way to know it wasn't well suited to their needs.
- cbm-vic-20 4y ago
  And UI designers. And product managers.

Msurrow 4y ago

This is funny. YOU are not wrong. But this answer is the wrong answer. I believe you fall in OPs category no 2. He’s asking for specific forums.. so, you know any? :)

xtracto 4y ago
Great reply! I know even news.ycombinator suffers from the issues the OP is listing. My take is that people participating in a public forum WANT to be read (including me with this post!), so you will find all sort of tangent conversations that have nothing to do with the main subject being discussed (like my very comment). What if, there was a StackOverflow like forum which, for a given question ONLY the person who asked could see all the answers, and only the answer they chose as correct/relevant/good would be the one published. That might decrease the noise in different conversations. It's one of the things I liked about the SlashDot moderation system: There was a "-1 Offtopic" flag. No matter how good or interesting your answer was, if it is offtopic it should be marked as such.
- shagie 4y ago
  > What if, there was a StackOverflow like forum which, for a given question ONLY the person who asked could see all the answers, and only the answer they chose as correct/relevant/good would be the one published. Stack Overflow has recognized that it has significant enough of a problem with accepted answers becoming outdated or just being plain wrong. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/411352/outdated-answers-accepted-answer-is-now-unpinned-on-stack-overflow https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/411352/outdated-ans... As an example, I point to https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/131397/why-use-try-finally-without-a-catch-clause/131400#131400 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1313... which for a long time had https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/131401 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/131401 as the accepted answer. > ... That might decrease the noise in different conversations. While it may, I fear (and having seen this in other places) that this would lead to some entitlement by the person asking the question seeing it as a personal help service instead of trying to build a repository of information. As someone who might answer, the related part would be "I don't want to be waisting my time duplicating work that someone else is doing."

viraptor 4y ago

> who thought they knew better and refused to reboot the device when asked That one is so annoying because it's equally likely that step was put in as a generic "why not", or as a crucial step. Half the software installers will tell you to restart when they're finished even though it's not necessary anymore. Many first level support people will tell you to restart your device when you're reporting their page returning 5XX. It's an issue with the industry conditioning people with BS rather than with customers expecting BS.

dasil003 4y ago
BS is a strong word. I would say it’s about bisecting the problem space and rebooting can address a lot of known and unknown states. Heck, just last week I got locked out of VPN on Mac OS due to not being up to date even though the system claimed it was. Guess what I had to do to get the update to appear?
- viraptor 4y ago
  No, i stand by it. There are situations where you need a reboot, there are others where it's a convenience (we could do a clean service/component registration and restart, but we'll just ask the user to reboot), and there are some "put it in the instructions just in case". Doing that and not actually enforcing the reboot when necessary trained a lot of people to ignore it and I can't blame them.
warrenm 4y ago
>Half the software installers will tell you to restart when they're finished even though it's not necessary anymore Methinks you either don't know what is "necessary", assume you know more than the developers of said software as to what is "necessary", or that you know better than OS vendors what is "necessary" Rebooting is simple, fast, and basically pain-free 99.99% of the time It clears memory, hung processes, file handles, and a host of other things - any (or all) of which could interact poorly with whatever software you're installing/upgrading may rely on If an installer wants a reboot, I fully expect the software to likely not work 100% correctly until said reboot has completed

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

On one of my favorite tech support calls, I told the customer to use a different wall outlet. He really didn't want to but finally I said, "can you just humor me please." Then from across the room I hear "oh my god, son of a bitch." Comes back on the phone: "you were right, the outlet isn't working."

TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
My friend withdrew money using an ATM. No money came out. He called the support number on the machine. They said "before we proceed, please humor me, put your hand in each pocket, and check the money is not there." The money was there.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

> I've also seen quite a few instances where the person needed fundamental corrections for their problems before their main problem could even be addressed, and they absolutely refused to accept those basic corrections first. It makes it impossible to help them with their real problem. In my experience, order isn't actually that critical. Sure, answering the question they asked won't solve their problem, but it will answer their question. Maybe solving their problem isn't what they want or need. Even if it is, the quickest and most painless way to navigate this social dynamic is to just answer the question they asked, and let them run into the other problems you predicted. This is especially important on StackOverflow (but also important to forums in general), because the entire point is to publish an answer to the question so others can find it later. By answering a person's problems instead of answering their question, you are just leaving more noise for the next person to dig through. Of course, it's still common to stumble about and ask the wrong questions; so how do we reconcile that? I think what StackOverflow is missing is a path for users to answer a question with another question. If we could communicate with the question asker to rephrase their question, then we could have them edit it, and trim the search engine noise for everyone else.

cillian64 4y ago

A while back the wireless charger I use for my phone stopped working, a few months after I bought it. Certain that the charger had died I contacted their support for a warranty replacement. They asked my to reboot my phone and I complied just to humour them. Imagine my surprise when the wireless charger then went back to working perfectly (and has been fine since).

ceejayoz 4y ago
Similarly, I once called my ISP after first rebooting 3x. They asked me to reboot, I insisted I had already done so, but lo and behold another reboot fixed it. I'm still half convinced they did something on their end and just didn't tell me. If they didn't, they've got another "stupid user lied about rebooting" story on their hands.