5 ms·

Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not just mention this was not working right

Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it? We could have fixed this, but if you do not say anything it might be a while before someone on the dev team notices."

agumonkey 3y ago
There's something difficult about notifying problems. You might make people angry, you might feel like a moron because you misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how they feel.
- bgirard 3y ago
  Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the contact to notify, start a conversation, update the conversation, wait for the issue to be picked up, wait for the software to be updated. Now repeat for everything you notice. If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to work around the issue and immediately get back to work.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Wait, don’t car assembly lines have a big red button you can push if you find a defect? Haven’t they for many years? Does pushing that button really make everyone angry? That’s not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    You're right, in some settings there's everything in place to ease communicating issues. But what if it's not something clear enough to trigger it ?
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      I completely agree with you that some errors could be missed if no one noticed them. This seems entirely separate from the idea that people could become angry if the line were stopped, but of course you are right.
throwway120385 3y ago
Yeah our support people at my company do the same thing. Then you'll get a report 6 months later that "[big critically important feature] is not working" and you'll look into it and support has adopted a process that essentially disables that feature or they have a workaround for a bug that was fixed 4 years ago and because they never entered the conversation at that time they still do the workaround. We had a big kerfluffle around our OTA update system at one point because they did a big round of updates and "none of them worked." And then I dug into the system logs for each of those components and 95% of what they claimed didn't work actually did. But meanwhile you've got product managers and other people wading into the conversation to try to tell you to fix something that isn't actually the problem. We're never truly going to get away from this until we stop excluding people from the conversation about product problems. I'm just sitting here hoping we adopt a quality management system of some sort before the company's product implodes.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  There was a poorly implemented customer support system that I worked with once that due to the way the app worked, support could run a query that would essentially scan the entire database, predictably it'd hit a proxy timeout. So what happened instead was they would open 10+ tabs doing the exact same query hoping one would get lucky and succeed, and we had to figure out why our database was getting ddos'd. Trying to explain that they were actually making the issue worse with the workaround was very painful, saying stuff like "well what did you change, it was working fine for months."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
IshKebab 3y ago
Have you tried thinking of the reasons? I can think of several: * There's probably a small chance it actually would get fixed, and therefore a decent probability that reporting it would be a waste of their time. * They needed a solution sooner than reporting it and waiting for fix to maybe eventually appear. Once the workaround was in place there was no need for a fix. * Sometimes the people running projects you use can be hostile, which makes reporting stuff very unappealing and even stressful. Much better to avoid interacting with them if at all possible. * They didn't know who to report it to, or how to report it. * They simply didn't have time to report it.
JohnFen 3y ago
I think that devs often underestimate just how difficult it is for users to report problems. The most common problems are that the users feel ignored, like they're being a burden on the devs, or scolded (for not reporting it correctly, for "not holding it right", etc.). It's even common for there not to be an easy way to report such problems ("use Discord", "sign up for an account on this website and report there", etc.) Even as a dev, I resist doing it because of how unpleasant it can be. If I can come up with a workaround without having to report the issue, that's what I'll tend to do. And if I have to talk to tech support rather than the devs? That's simply not going to happen unless I'm trapped into using the product. We still haven't cracked this problem as an industry.
- rurp 3y ago
  To make things worse the largest consumer tech companies, like Google and Apple, have a well deserved reputation for caring very little about customer feedback. It's a normal thing to lookup how to fix an annoyance or regression, finding hundreds of people posting about the same complaint, without ever getting any sort of response or reaction from the company. Heck the only support Google offers for many products is a community forum that their own employees never post on, and I assume few even look at. People have largely been conditioned to think that tech companies don't care about their feedback.
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    Very true, but funny enough, AWS has some of the best support of any product I have ever used.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev? This is a Support task, not a Dev task. Support should be working the tickets and reporting unsolvable issues with the code, so the Devs can address. You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work. Also, we Ops folks truly appreciate undocumented work arounds by the Devs. We love spending hours pouring over a given system, trying 107 different versions of some framework, causing lots of downtime, and working nights/weekends, just to learn that some UNDOCUMENTED cludge fucking bullshit is what's actually causing the issue. Do better man. You're shitting on more than just the users.
77pt77 3y ago
> Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it? Because in the real world messengers get shot.

agumonkey 3y ago

There's something difficult about notifying problems. You might make people angry, you might feel like a moron because you misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how they feel.

bgirard 3y ago
Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the contact to notify, start a conversation, update the conversation, wait for the issue to be picked up, wait for the software to be updated. Now repeat for everything you notice. If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to work around the issue and immediately get back to work.
singleshot_ 3y ago
Wait, don’t car assembly lines have a big red button you can push if you find a defect? Haven’t they for many years? Does pushing that button really make everyone angry? That’s not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  You're right, in some settings there's everything in place to ease communicating issues. But what if it's not something clear enough to trigger it ?
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    I completely agree with you that some errors could be missed if no one noticed them. This seems entirely separate from the idea that people could become angry if the line were stopped, but of course you are right.

throwway120385 3y ago

Yeah our support people at my company do the same thing. Then you'll get a report 6 months later that "[big critically important feature] is not working" and you'll look into it and support has adopted a process that essentially disables that feature or they have a workaround for a bug that was fixed 4 years ago and because they never entered the conversation at that time they still do the workaround. We had a big kerfluffle around our OTA update system at one point because they did a big round of updates and "none of them worked." And then I dug into the system logs for each of those components and 95% of what they claimed didn't work actually did. But meanwhile you've got product managers and other people wading into the conversation to try to tell you to fix something that isn't actually the problem. We're never truly going to get away from this until we stop excluding people from the conversation about product problems. I'm just sitting here hoping we adopt a quality management system of some sort before the company's product implodes.

JohnMakin 3y ago
There was a poorly implemented customer support system that I worked with once that due to the way the app worked, support could run a query that would essentially scan the entire database, predictably it'd hit a proxy timeout. So what happened instead was they would open 10+ tabs doing the exact same query hoping one would get lucky and succeed, and we had to figure out why our database was getting ddos'd. Trying to explain that they were actually making the issue worse with the workaround was very painful, saying stuff like "well what did you change, it was working fine for months."

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

IshKebab 3y ago

Have you tried thinking of the reasons? I can think of several: * There's probably a small chance it actually would get fixed, and therefore a decent probability that reporting it would be a waste of their time. * They needed a solution sooner than reporting it and waiting for fix to maybe eventually appear. Once the workaround was in place there was no need for a fix. * Sometimes the people running projects you use can be hostile, which makes reporting stuff very unappealing and even stressful. Much better to avoid interacting with them if at all possible. * They didn't know who to report it to, or how to report it. * They simply didn't have time to report it.

JohnFen 3y ago

I think that devs often underestimate just how difficult it is for users to report problems. The most common problems are that the users feel ignored, like they're being a burden on the devs, or scolded (for not reporting it correctly, for "not holding it right", etc.). It's even common for there not to be an easy way to report such problems ("use Discord", "sign up for an account on this website and report there", etc.) Even as a dev, I resist doing it because of how unpleasant it can be. If I can come up with a workaround without having to report the issue, that's what I'll tend to do. And if I have to talk to tech support rather than the devs? That's simply not going to happen unless I'm trapped into using the product. We still haven't cracked this problem as an industry.

rurp 3y ago
To make things worse the largest consumer tech companies, like Google and Apple, have a well deserved reputation for caring very little about customer feedback. It's a normal thing to lookup how to fix an annoyance or regression, finding hundreds of people posting about the same complaint, without ever getting any sort of response or reaction from the company. Heck the only support Google offers for many products is a community forum that their own employees never post on, and I assume few even look at. People have largely been conditioned to think that tech companies don't care about their feedback.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Very true, but funny enough, AWS has some of the best support of any product I have ever used.
sonicanatidae 3y ago
Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev? This is a Support task, not a Dev task. Support should be working the tickets and reporting unsolvable issues with the code, so the Devs can address. You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work. Also, we Ops folks truly appreciate undocumented work arounds by the Devs. We love spending hours pouring over a given system, trying 107 different versions of some framework, causing lots of downtime, and working nights/weekends, just to learn that some UNDOCUMENTED cludge fucking bullshit is what's actually causing the issue. Do better man. You're shitting on more than just the users.

77pt77 3y ago

> Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it? Because in the real world messengers get shot.