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Sometimes adding humans is the best option? How about just hire some student workers to sweep through bug reports remotely? Even some Mechanical Turk approach m

by DeepDuh 14y ago

Sometimes adding humans is the best option? How about just hire some student workers to sweep through bug reports remotely? Even some Mechanical Turk approach might work, if you can create some checklist of what a useful bug report must have (and if you got this, it could also be integrated into the bug tracker workflow).

aidenn0 14y ago
That's hard to do because you end up with situations where the bug submitter figures out s/he knows more about the product than the person on the other end of the line, and stops responding out of frustration.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  So? Just close those reports then. I thought the issue here is to filter out anything spammy while not loosing any potentially valuable reports. A human should be able to filter out at least 90% of the spammy stuff while not loosing any good ones, thus significantly reducing the workload of engineers in higher pay grades. Google sometimes give me the impression they want to absolutely only hire the best engineers, but I'd argue that many non automatable tasks can be done more efficiently by having some reasonably trained lower rank staff. See also all the complaints about missing service when trying to use Google products commercially - if they do want to seriously enter that market, this stuff needs to change significantly. Other things that come to mind: Automated Youtube takedowns and Gmail account blocks. Do you really want to save those few million bucks a year for not hiring support staff, then have lots of disgruntled users blogging about how evil you are and then pouring those millions into PR campaigns?
  - aidenn0 14y ago
    " I thought the issue here is to filter out anything spammy while not loosing any potentially valuable reports. " Yes! But, in my comment I pointed out a specific example of where you lose a potentially valuable report.

by DeepDuh 14y ago

aidenn0 14y ago

That's hard to do because you end up with situations where the bug submitter figures out s/he knows more about the product than the person on the other end of the line, and stops responding out of frustration.

DeepDuh 14y ago
So? Just close those reports then. I thought the issue here is to filter out anything spammy while not loosing any potentially valuable reports. A human should be able to filter out at least 90% of the spammy stuff while not loosing any good ones, thus significantly reducing the workload of engineers in higher pay grades. Google sometimes give me the impression they want to absolutely only hire the best engineers, but I'd argue that many non automatable tasks can be done more efficiently by having some reasonably trained lower rank staff. See also all the complaints about missing service when trying to use Google products commercially - if they do want to seriously enter that market, this stuff needs to change significantly. Other things that come to mind: Automated Youtube takedowns and Gmail account blocks. Do you really want to save those few million bucks a year for not hiring support staff, then have lots of disgruntled users blogging about how evil you are and then pouring those millions into PR campaigns?
- aidenn0 14y ago
  " I thought the issue here is to filter out anything spammy while not loosing any potentially valuable reports. " Yes! But, in my comment I pointed out a specific example of where you lose a potentially valuable report.