My favourite variant of this merrygoround is when they ask you to demonstrate the issue live in a Teams session, you do so, and there's this moment of silence followed by an "Oh... I see".

Then you assume, naively, that this means that they've recognised that there really is a product problem and will go off and fix it. However, then in turn the support tech needs to reproduce the the issue to the development team.

They invariably fail to do so for any number of reasons, such as: This only happens in my region, not others. Or the support tech's lab environment doesn't actually allow them to spin up the high-spec thing that's broken. Or whatever.

Then the ticket gets reject with "can't reproduce" after you've reproduced the issue, with a recorded video and everything as evidence.

If you then navigate that gauntlet, the ticket is most typically rejected with "It is broken like that by design, closed."

I recompiled OpenSSL to make s_server -www return the correct, static XML blob for a .NET application that was buggy to make a reproducer for them that didn't rely on our product at all and which could be self-contained on a very barren windows VM they could play with to their heart's content and which didn't even care about the network because everything was connecting via loopback, so they couldn't blame that, eitehr.

Turns out there was a known bug in Microsoft schannel that had yet to be patched and they'd wasted weeks of our effort by not searching their own bug tracker properly.

It'd kind of sad, how the market went. I suppose there are pluses too.

But back in the 80s and 90s, margins were significantly higher. If you look at hardware, I recall selling hardware with 30% margin, if not more... even 80% on some items.

Yet what came with that was support, support, support. And when you sell 5 computers a month, instead of 500, well.. you need that margin to even have a store. Which you need, because no wide-scale internet.

On the software side, it was sort of the same. I remember paying $80 for some pieces of software, which would be like $200 today. You'd pay $1 on an app store for such software, but I'd also call the author if there was a bug. He'd send an update in the mail.

I guess my point is, in those days, it was fun to fix issues. The focus was more specific, there was time to ply the trade, to enjoy it, to have performant, elegant fixes.

Now, it's all "my boss is hassling me and another bug will somehow mean I have to work harder", which is .. well, sad.

I totally understand that from the perspective of individual employees: they have little incentive to do more than the bare minimum to close tickets. But this behavior is typically a symptom of broken corporate culture and failure to align internal metrics. For every customer who takes the trouble to submit a formal bug report there are likely many others who just live with it, and badmouth you to other customers. Doing deep investigations of even minor bug reports also tends to expose other, more serious latent bugs. And root cause analysis allows you to create closed-loop solutions to prevent similar future bugs.

Large monopolistic tech companies like Apple and Microsoft can afford to ignore this stuff for years because there are few realistic alternatives. But longer term eventually a disruptive competitor comes along who takes product quality and customer service more seriously.

It's a false dichotomy - something being "a simple cost/benefit analysis" doesn't remove the ethical dimension, and can absolutely be nefarious. A movie villain saying "it was just business" doesn't make their actions less villainous.

I’d argue that there should be no higher business priority than shipping a product you already sold. If you sold a product and your customer spends their time documenting exactly why and how you sold them something that’s broken, you should make that a high priority. As a natural progression, you’ll start shipping less buggy / better tested products and that’s how you unlock yourself from the obligation you made to your existing customers to do other work.

Not directed at you of course, just the proverbial “you” from the frustration of a purchaser of software.

As an open source maintainer, I feel that statement is really unfair. Yes, we do sometimes close bug reports without evidence they are fixed. But:

- We owe you nothing! And the fact that people still expect maintainers to work for them is really sad, IMHO.

- Unlike corporate workers, nobody is measuring our productivity therefore we have no incentive to close issues if we believe they are unfixed. That means that when we close the issue, we believe it has a high chance of being fixed, and also we weigh the cost of having many maybe-fixed open issues against maybe closing a standing issue, and (try to) choose what's best for the project.

Take a look at Anthropic's repo. They auto-close issues after just a few weeks.

I don't think I've seen an issue of theirs that wasn't auto-closed.

Fuck stalebot.

[delayed]

Please tell us where you work so we can avoid all of your company’s software. Unless it’s Microsoft, because we’ve already seen the results of that attitude there.

Back when I worked at Apple I would just try it in whatever I had installed. If it didn't reproduce I'd write "Cannot reproduce in 10.x.x" and close it. Maybe a third were like that, duplicates of some other issue that was resolved long ago.

Anyone that attached a repro file to their issue got attention because it was easy enough to test. Sometimes crash traces got attention, I'd open the code and check out what it was. If it was like a top 15 crash trace then I'd spend a lot longer on it.

If the ticket was long and involved like "make an iMovie and tween it in just such and such a way" then probably I'd fiddle around for 10-15 minutes before downgrading its priority and hope a repro file would come about.

There were a bunch of bug reports for a deprecated codec that I closed and one guy angrily replied that I couldn't just close issues I didn't want to fix!

Guess what buddy, nobody's ever going to fix it.

But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there.

Yes that's a thing, but never with external customers in public betas

Companies have no consciences.

Ooh this gives me an interesting passive-aggressive idea to counter pointless "is this still relevant" questions. "No, I haven't hit this in the last 2 days." "No, I haven't hit this since I gave up trying to do it with your tool." And so forth.

The less passive-aggressive version is to use this obviously-unhelpful answer of the obviously-unhelpful question, to actually have a conversation to get the PM to recognize that the default state of a ticket is in fact "no change." Ultimately that may turn into a stale bot if the PM realizes the policy they actually want is some sort of timeout, but at least it's not a time consuming meeting!

(Note, a cathartic thought experiment, but not really good manners to actually do!)

Absolutely spot on LOL