How much are these customers paying for support to have Raymond Chen on first level support to debug their batch files?

Top level engineers and other VIPs are people too. And it is often surprising how "low" they can get.

We may imagine the CEO of a large company in his throne room, only reachable through his servant and only for matters of utmost importance, billion dollar contracts and all that. And sure, there is that, but not just that.

You may occasionally find out that the guy who a replaced a defective Ethernet cable on the intern's computer was that CEO. Or the lead developer of a AAA game patiently explaining some basic functionality to a random gamer. A CTO may pick up a random support call. So Raymond Chen debugging an "obvious" problem in a .bat script, not at all surprising to me.

It has already happened to me that on a support call where I expect some underpaid grunt, find that the guy is really good, patient and friendly, only to end up discovering that I just talked to the one who built the whole thing. Makes my day when it happens.

It think that if I was some kind of VIP top level whatever, I would cherish these moments. Simple things, genuine human contact, away from the big responsibilities tied to my position. And even from a professional perspective, getting a feel for what happens down there is important.

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ninjagoo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How much are these customers paying for support to have Raymond Chen on first level support to debug their batch files?

Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?

Or maybe he was on a project working directly with the client already, so this was just part of whatever he was working on.

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cowanon77 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The post doesn’t mention a year. Early Microsoft Windows was very badly documented and the docs were difficult to search, so it wouldn't surprise me that it took senior level support to know that fact.

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pixl97 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And there weren't tools like process monitor that showed way more about the state of what was running

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charlieyu1 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s the same for 2026

	▲	solyin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah but we got AI now. Ask codex to get rid of McAfee for you.

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perching_aix 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

i envy the folks who can actually make sense of msdn docs. they were tedious and overwhelming decades before ai made that the premiere style this year.

some parts are better than others, but god is it a quest to find anything in there.

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II2II 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?

On something like Unix, I suspect this would be easy to figure out since programs typically dump diagnostic information to the terminal. On Windows, this would likely be thing learned through prior experience (especially since it would depend upon the program being launched).

	▲	thesuitonym 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He said that the program displayed an error message on the command line. That's diagnostic information dumped to the terminal.

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cucumber3732842 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Senior people like Raymond Chen (or at least the good ones) often get to where they are by doing some amount of work that's "below them" or outside their scope in order to keep their understanding of the full stack up to date.

It wouldn't surprise me if he's periodically snooping the lowest level support queues from time to time to understand what kinds of issues customers face, where the pain points are, etc, etc.

	▲	inemesitaffia 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's also an old post. It's like Patreon, accessible to staff first

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LatencyKills 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Chen was browsing through open tickets, found this one, and grabbed it.

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ajasmin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting.

That’s a rare privilege!

	▲	LatencyKills 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can't even begin to tell you how lucky I felt at the time. I loved the work and the people.

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chrsw 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm pretty sure I heard Chen say on a podcast that he has a significant backlog of posts that he puts up when he feels like it.

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RajT88 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's probably a dozen posts at least for getting applications to find their dependencies because of one behavior or another. COM servers, .Net. Trying to get running apps to use an updated PATH or other environment variable.

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Dylan16807 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think this has anything to do with what you responded to?

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toyg 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the point is that he's not really active anymore, he's just relaying tales from his past.

I'd be very, very surprised if MS had Raymond motherfuckin' Chen looking at support queues in 2026.

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Dylan16807 7 hours ago | parent [-]

He's telling stories from the past either way. The blog backlog isn't very important.

In an interview he said the backlog has varied from 3 to 18 months. Pretty negligible in terms of his career advancement. This isn't something he wrote ages ago.

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LatencyKills 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> He's telling stories from the past either way.

I'm sorry but why would that bother you? Is my experience not valid any longer?

My point was: it is not at all surprising that a lvl 70 was poking through active support tickets because many of us did the same thing. I retired at Chen's level btw.

I don't know how Chen discovered this issue of course but it could have been exactly how I described it.

	▲	Dylan16807 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I'm sorry but why would that bother you? Is my experience not valid any longer? What? Huh? I have no idea what you think I meant but it's not what I meant. I'm making a simple point: His backlog is not the reason he's talking about a ticket like this in 2026. Either he took this ticket this year-ish, or he wrote this year-ish about something that happened long before. It is not the case that he wrote this post years and years ago and it was sitting in the backlog for that long.

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LatencyKills 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right... but my point was that even distinguished engineers at MS (lvl 70+) go "ticket diving" from time to time. It was somewhat contentious because juniors complained that all the "fun" tickets were taken by seniors.

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qingcharles 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I was working on some Windows Media DRM stuff and would get pinged with the really loopy support emails, most of the time not to have me fix them, just more of a heads-up. One said "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ON MY PC EVERY MORNING GET THE FUCK OFF MY COMPUTER". I actually started to reply to this chap to see if I could get some sense, but a VP was nearby and saw my screen. They picked up my keyboard, wrote "FUCK OFF" and hit send.

	▲	LatencyKills 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sorry, but that is kind of hilarious. I was lucky that I rarely had to deal with people like that. Most of the time is was low-level C folks who had found a real bug in one of the tools, compilers, etc.