Re:How You Respond to Security Researchers Says Everything A...
by arp242 on Sunday January 22, 2023 @11:00PM
(#34485323)
Right; I'm just going on what I'm reading in your post, which I assumed was the full thread.
Obviously I don't know what this "Melvin" person thinks or feels, but a number of things in your emails would elicit a "fuck you"-response for me. Even though your frustration might be understandable – I really hate dealing with this kind of stuff too – that's rarely helpful.
I don't know if you've ever done support work, but typically you need to deal with a lot of genuine assholes and unreasonable people, and people tend to contact support when something isn't working, so they're already more frustrated (i.e. angry) than average. So it's not surprising that in support people tend to get a bit more defensive than normal, and jump to conclusions faster. "Oh, another asshole".
And you need to answer n tickets every day, and response times are often monitored as well. You don't have time to carefully reflect and think about things for 10 minutes over a coffee. If someone on HN replies and my immediate feeling is "fuck you" I typically let it be, and maybe reply a few hours later, or the next day, or not at all. You don't really have this option in support.
There's also the art of "white lies" here. Instead of going on in detail on why Bugcrowd doesn't work just say there are technical issue with Bugcrowd or something like that. No need to explain they erroneously closed your report because "they shat the bed".
Obviously I don't know what this "Melvin" person thinks or feels, but a number of things in your emails would elicit a "fuck you"-response for me. Even though your frustration might be understandable – I really hate dealing with this kind of stuff too – that's rarely helpful.
I don't know if you've ever done support work, but typically you need to deal with a lot of genuine assholes and unreasonable people, and people tend to contact support when something isn't working, so they're already more frustrated (i.e. angry) than average. So it's not surprising that in support people tend to get a bit more defensive than normal, and jump to conclusions faster. "Oh, another asshole".
And you need to answer n tickets every day, and response times are often monitored as well. You don't have time to carefully reflect and think about things for 10 minutes over a coffee. If someone on HN replies and my immediate feeling is "fuck you" I typically let it be, and maybe reply a few hours later, or the next day, or not at all. You don't really have this option in support.
There's also the art of "white lies" here. Instead of going on in detail on why Bugcrowd doesn't work just say there are technical issue with Bugcrowd or something like that. No need to explain they erroneously closed your report because "they shat the bed".