Yep. On the other side of the curtain this often isn't nefarious. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis of spending time on something that one user is complaining about versus a backlog of higher business priorities. I've seen this in my work and it makes me sad for the user, but it often does take a bit of effort to spear these bug reports through.

▲ nradov 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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SchemaLoad 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There's also going to be mountains of bugs resulting from cosmic rays hitting the computer, defective ram chips, weird modifications of the system the reporter hasn't mentioned.

You could sink an infinite amount of time investigating and find nothing. At some point you have to cut off the time investment when only one person has reported it and no devs have been able to reproduce it.

	▲	PunchyHamster 40 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If bug contains instructions for reproduction most of that will be eliminated.
	▲	alexdowad 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There's obviously some nuance here, but the fact is that much modern software is riddled with bugs, and this is sub-optimal for everyone (both software users and software builders). Most of the bugs which frustrate and irritate software users are not due to uncontrollable events such as cosmic rays flipping a bit. Most of them are plain old code defects. But, you do have a valid point. Allow me to rephrase it this way: The answer is not for software companies to spend unbounded amounts of engineer time chasing every reported bug. But there are ways that we, as an industry, can do better, and it's not by pouring all our time into chasing hard-to-diagnose bugs. Here are a few ways that I personally see: 1. Some very powerful technologies for finding many bugs with little engineering effort already exist, but are not widely used. As an example, coverage-guided fuzzing is amazingly good at finding all kinds of obscure bugs. The idea of coverage-guided fuzzing was known from the 1990's, but it took AFL (in ~2013) to take it mainstream. Even now, much of the industry is not benefiting from the awesome power of coverage-guided fuzzing. And there are other, equally powerful techniques which have been known for a long time, but are even less accessible to most software developers. So: spread the word about such techniques, and for programming language/platform developers, work on making them more easily applicable. This could help many software companies to catch a great number of bugs before they ever go to production. 2. Similarly, there are extant historical computing systems which had very powerful debugging facilities, much better than what is currently available to most developers. The ideas on how to make our platforms more debuggable are already out there; it's now a matter of popularizing those ideas and making them readily accessible and applicable. 3. Since it's widely known that many bugs (real bugs, not "cosmic rays") are extremely hard to reproduce, an admirable target for us to aim for as developers is to implement debug logging in a way which allows us to root-cause most obscure bugs just by examining the logs (i.e. no need to search for a reproducer). Some real-world systems have achieved that goal, with very good results. 4. While there is currently much buzz about using LLM-based coding agents to write code, I think an almost better use case for coding agents is in triaging bug reports, diagnosing the bugs, finding reproducers, etc. I've recently had a couple of shocking experiences where, just given a written description of an intermittent, hard-to-diagnose bug, a coding agent was able to search an entire codebase, identify the exact cause, and write a reproducer test case. (And this after multiple experienced human programmers had looked at the issue but failed to identify the cause.) In summary, I think there are ways to "cut the Gordian knot" of bug reports.
	▲	ImPostingOnHN an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		What if no devs even tried to reproduce it, and they have no reason to believe they've fixed the bug with any other changes? That seems to be the case described in the article. In such a situation, I think it's dishonest to ask the reporter to expend even more effort when you've spent zero. Just close it if you don't want to do it, you don't have to be a jerk to your customers, too, by sending them off on a wild goose chase. Otherwise, why not ask the reporter to reproduce the issue every single day until you choose to fix it in some unknown point in the future, and if they miss a day, it gets closed? That seems just as arbitrary.
	▲	hu3 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'll steal this to my projects bug template! /s "Please consider cosmic rays hitting the computer, defective ram chips, weird modifications of the system before submitting the bug. Unlesss you explicitly aknowledge that, your bug will be closed automatically in 30 days. Thank you very much"

▲ godelski 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  > this often isn't nefarious. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis of spending time on something that one user is complaining about versus a backlog of higher business priorities.

You can triage without closing tickets. So it is nefarious. It is metric hacking

If you're having trouble reproducing, tag "needs verification" or something else. But closing a ticket isn't triaging, it is sweeping problems under the rug

▲ falcor84 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ conductr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	FridgeSeal 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Careful saying that too loudly, the “ship new features at all costs” gang will come for your head. They don’t approve of things like “quality software” and “making stuff that works past the demo and cursory inspection” or “actual user utility”.