I also feel that this is happening more and more, since there's more rewards for giving very small pieces of attention and energy to a bigger pool of people, instead giving extra energy or attention to a smaller pool of people seeking for one's help.
I'm just facing this with a contractor doing repairs in my house, a month ago was finding a decent mechanic to fix just 2 issues on my car.
The first promptly finds energy to discuss things it receives through social networks or messages, but can't provide a decent list of things that I need to provide him to finish his work faster.
The second case took a lot of time and discussing with 6 different mechanics, until th car broke and it was towed.
I'm seeing this more and more, unfortunately.
The only interaction possible is they can tell you the problem, then you can give them a list of things to try, and they can do nothing but give feedback on each step, in order, and you arent bothered until they at least respond something for each step
This is obviously satire, but we could make every internet app completely modal: once you start a flow on any site your computer prohibits you from starting any other flow on any other site before you complete the previous one.
> insufficient attention to detail
I believe there's a cause effect scenario here.
- be on time
- respond to emails/texts, and especially: phone calls
- give quotes
Then if you're even halfway competent, the world is your oyster. Please come do work for me!
If you can manage people and budgets, you can have more work than you'll know what to do with (assuming there's work available).
The inability of many people to focus their attention and prioritize their work is shocking to me. This isn't just for the stereotypical "younger adult" either, this seems to apply across the board (and especially to boomer-aged adults!).
Are you saying that you give your contractor a list of seven things to address, and find that they only address two and say they're done?
I can't remember where I heard of using painter's tape for this, but it's used as a metaphor in this article https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-blue-tape-list/
.... I also found this link while looking for the above article, https://www.quantumbalancing.com/news/bluetape.htm . That's. ... just... well. Not what I was looking for, but was so remarkable that I thought I would link to it here. I suppose they have probably sold some of their devices. I'm curious to know what the insides are like, but not curious enough to spend $1k+.
// Fixme: address this later.
Oh, no. It's not a shuffle. They unerringly identify the least important possible action item. Sometimes just a single clause of a single sentence in a list item.
You have to scour your communication of anything that can possibly be interpreted as an easy request. It has to be a curt, imperative, isolated, request to do something hard or it will be ignored.
2. Wait
3. Update your XYZ
User: I tried the second option but nothing happened
"I need your engagement level to be set to 10 for this communication. It's ok if you can't do that, but then just say you can't do that. I'm already set to 10 and rando guesswork / tidbits are only going to cause problems."
Even just "nope can't do it" responses would save me time.
I just got off a critical call with folks pulling stuff out of their ... and it was a nightmare / complete waste of my time.
Much easier and safer is to drill into your own head that your own engagement level may be at 10, but the other person's is probably going to be more like 2. And that's fine.
I'm not asking them to be at 10, I'm asking they not engage unless they are.
Notice your parent doesn't say "you must be at 10," but rather "let me know if you can't be at 10." I think that's perfectly reasonable, as long as you're willing to accept almost always getting "no."
> Much easier and safer is to drill into your own head that your own engagement level may be at 10, but the other person's is probably going to be more like 2. And that's fine.
But sometimes that's not fine! For example, if you're giving a list of instructions for some safety-critical procedure, it's not fine to find out later that the nodding "uh-huh, uh-huh" actually meant "I'll do what I remember and what sounds easy," and it's much better to do nothing than to proceed with partial information.
I have to give every idea it's own sentence, and every sentence must be separated by double space at minimum.
And then I can't offer more than maybe four complete ideas, no more than one of which can demand a response.
They wound up answering every question in my list of five, spent enough time on some of them that I think that may have been part of the motivation for them to break it up into two videos, and even emailed me the answer to the one out of five points they didn't address in the video.
In contrast if I render a list at any of my colleagues or vendor dev teams there is a <20% chance that they will address or even acknowledge 2 whole separate items out of the list, so the points they don't address get frequently brought back up again and dropped again. :(
So AI researcher has.. ..list comprehension. (YEAAAH!!)
This comment should be three paragraphs. As written, it’s very hard to read and I get lost.
If this was a professional communication and you had asked three questions, I might understand one or might not. Now I have no issues saying “dude, your writing is very hard to follow.” But what if your colleagues are nicer than I am?
Or just spitballing. You’ve admitted that you’re the kind of person who will set traps for your colleagues. What if they’re just sick of your shit but are too conflict avoidant to say that?
What is that even based on? Where did they admit to setting up traps? Is that your take on their comment about trying to ask three questions in one message?
Because, even without them creating paragraphs, it is abundantly clear they just mean that as something from experience. Not something they do as something to spring a trap on people.
“When confronted (constructively, much later) they usually get evasive and can’t explain.”
Confronted is a big word with a hostile intent. They’re incredibly measured in their language and use precise language. That sounds like a trap to me - it’s:
A.) Asking three questions and only get 1/3 answered.
B.) Waiting for a suitable period of time to elapse.
C.) Confronting them while expecting an explanation.
Letting time go by, “confronting them” and expecting an explanation is a trap. It assumes that they can even remember the conversation! Why not send a follow up email immediately and politely ask again? Heck, that’s a good excuse to use “circle back” in conversation. :)
If you missed that first read, no worries because so did I. I had to read the comment three times and then I kind of shaked my head because they are so measured and precise, and that’s an awfully big statement to make about colleagues.
Confronted isn't necessarily a hostile word. It is a very apt word to use for the action off asking someone about the other two points. They even made it clear that it was in a constructive manner.
May I ask, do you often feel like you are operating in a hostile environment?
We were all close and could discuss “meta” from time to time, in a friendly constructive manner. You’re probably reading more into this aspect than there is.
At my last job we had a customer who was famous for doing this. Since he generated a significant amount of sales, we couldn't just sideline him, so I learned to only ask one question at a time on email. Otherwise, if you asked e.g., three questions, it was a complete tossup as to which one he would decide to answer, all the while reminding you that this was a "hair on fire" issue for him.
Compounded with the fact that he was on another continent, multiple time zones away, this made debugging anything a difficult proposition.
We had another customer for the same product in the same country who had absolutely no problem answering whatever questions you asked him, in as much detail as he could supply. It has to be a personality thing.
"Try this one thing: ....
If you are a detail-oriented person, you could also save us both some time and try these things also ..."
Me: Please try these 3 things and let me know how it goes: (list of 3 things with instructions)
Them: I tried (thing #1) and it didn’t work.
Me: Thank you, please try these 2 things and let me know how it goes
Them: I tried (thing #2) and it didn’t work.
Me: Thank you, please try this thing and let me know how it goes
Them: (no response)
Me: Just checking in to see if this is resolved?
Them: (no response)
Me: I’m closing this ticket as I haven’t heard back, let me know if this is still a problem and I can reopen it
Them: Don’t close the ticket, I’m still having this issue
Me: No problem, can you try this thing and let me know how it goes?
Them: (no response)
(Siemens) Support: Before I can help you, please find the serial number via <tedious procedure>, and the exact version of subsystems <x, y and z>.
Me: Here you go, though I fail to see how my specific setup is relevant as the problem has been reported on forums for years, and it is easily reproducible
Support: Please update to latest version x.
Me: Version x has known regression which will break the machine for the customer. I did the 1 hour procedure anyway but the issue is still present.
Support: Please execute this <obtuse command that runs a trace> and download the log from <airgapped machine> with SCP
Me: O well, did that here is the file. Don't understand why you can't run it on your machine
Support: Please try <irrelevant thing>, reboot (wait 5 minutes) and run the trace again
Me: (Gives up)
Is Support just completely disconnected from Engineering? Do they not have a way to report issues and indicate that many customers are having a specific issue?
Does the company believe that giving a customer a runaround will make them less upset than saying "Sorry, this is a known issue. We're working on it but do not have a timeline"?
Certainly at some point, some support person is going to be like "Huh, we have a lot of customers complaining about an issue, and our usual flowchart script doesn't seem to resolve it" and try to work it up the chain, right? Or does it get to their manager who says "Meh, that's an engineering problem, not a support problem. Get back to your tickets!" and never pass it up?
This is the usual response when a companies customer numbers start to scale up so far that the volume of users like the ones in Vegenoid's parent comment start to overwhelm the support staff. Keeping up the good/decent customer support that you could give to your first few hundred or perhaps even few thousand users eventually becomes ludicrously expensive or even impossible.
Then the original article's "Keeping this running and supported is shit. People are idiots and time wasters! Automate all the things!" stage kicks in.
So "first level support" is created, who's main objective is to get rid of support requests with the minimal effort by the least skilled staff possible. So everything is written into a script that call centre employees are required to follow. Low skill minimal wage staff are required to ask stupid things like "Have you tried reinstalling Windows?" and getting a confirmation that they have - before any support request is passed on to even a junior or intern developer. At this stage nobody gives a damn about users who need help, and they outsource that work to other users on the "community forums" and the entire support team is fired.
(Google, of course, being a world leader in both webtech and customer acquisition, completely skipped the "provide decent customer service" stage and went directly to the "don't give a damn about users" end game.)
And so I was fired and could no longer support myself or my family, that's why I'm applying to a position with the lowest pay grade,
It's the capitalism, not a red cross
Cheating your customer is a dangerous game. They are not dumb.
The tendency to wall off engineers is often taken to a counterproductive level.
(Don't actualy do this unless you want to burn money)
But there's a line SOMEWHERE. The few tickets that DO need engineering time REALLY NEED IT, and it's completely asinine that in some corporations, it's impossible.
If, for example, 100 people are talking to support for the exact same crash, and people in support are able to reproduce it, it needs to go to Engineering, rather than support telling customers "Have you tried formatting your drive and reinstalling everything from scratch?" when they already know it won't fix anything.
That combination kept the customer-frustrating bugs quite low, while still allowing engineering to keep developing new features at a fairly rapid pace.
(and then we got purchased by a PE firm and dismantled)
Support is almost always tiered because $$$. In an ideal situation (hello GitLab!) tier 1 they are friendly and competent triage artists that can redirect lost customers and handle the common basic cases. Tier two is essentially an experienced and skilled tier 1. It's not until you get to tier 3 that you reach an engineer, usually one dedicated to support. That engineer is the one who reaches out to the operational engineering team if needed.
The amount of times the software doesn't work because the HASP key [1] is plugged into a different machine is so many.
You just can't trust that they've done any basic troubleshooting and so have to start from a completely blank slate.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle
Yes.
Unless you want to drive engineering insane / waste a ton of money.
If a customer seems to have discovered a legit bug in the software, there needs to be a path from support to engineering for the bug to get reported.
At the very least, support staff should be willing and able to attempt to recreate a bug that a user is reporting, rather than asking them to completely wipe their device and install everything from scratch for something that is easily reproduced.
Let's take a very simple example. Imagine you've got this Chess app, and whenever someone creates a checkmate involving two bishops, the game crashes, 100% of the time, but only in cases involving two bishops. Sure, maybe the first ticket you get, you go through the workflow of reinstalling, etc. But by the time you've got 100 tickets all saying their game crashed on a checkmate involving two bishops, that should have been escalated to engineering. At the very least, support should be saying it's a known issue. Honesty is going to be a lot less frustrating than to be told to take steps that both sides knows won't fix the issue.
These flows are intended to dissuade problem reports, because the business is too big to care.
I once reported a ui bug to Discord(the game chat). This is how it went.
- me wrote an elaborate email and screenshots of the problem with step-by-step guide to reproduce it
- support responded me by asking build version, my os version, device type
- me screenshot all the requested details + manually wrote down in response email so someone can also copy-paste somewhere directly from my email
- support responds by asking me to clear my iphone cache(sending me a guide for Android's App data cleaning process) and see if issue persists
- me respond that it is not Android and since I knew what they will ask, I have uninstalled, reinstalled, logged-out, logged in and documented the whole process by recording my screen while doing it
- support, please try to logout, then uninstall and reinstall again
- me begrudingly do it again(record screen), send them everything
- support, could you try updating your device OS? - me check for updates, iOS says it is latest, me send screenshots
- support, can you try disconnecting and reconnecting to your network or rebooting your device?
- me follow the steps(by recording my device using another device) and send it back
- support, can you try factory resetting your device
- me get pissed off, I mean c'mon, the issue is that, the client is incorrectly handling the on-screen keyboard events and has nothing to do with my device, but giveup anyways and write on twitter that I tried to report an ui bug, is there some engineers I can reach out to?
- twitter official DM me and what do you know, it was the same person who was responding to my emails and tells me, if I tried resetting my device to factory default, else they'll close my ticket as not reproducible
I just gave up and uninstalled discord. I mean, sure there are lot of useless problem reports, but when your user goes on to extreme lengths to document an issue and cooperates, please take it seriously.
In most cases, the whole script is intended to deter the less patient consumers/users and not actually solve any problems. In some cases, the support is just an outsourced team with no connect/contact with actual team or the product.
Except… recently I completely misdiagnosed something. So while I was getting politely frustrated with the support clerk, he was stepping me through a set of irrelevant seeming procedures which, indeed, resulted in identifying that a piece of hardware was broken.
In this case it was the fiber to Ethernet adapter my ISP uses. He needed me to verify that, at every step of the way, pieces of my infrastructure were not the cause of my flaky connection (they weren’t). However, as a final step he had me reboot the adapter and it didn’t start back up. Turns out this is a rare failure mode and the flaky network I’d been seeing was an early, year long, symptom of this issue.
I had DSL with a router and modem. I never had problems with it, never required reset etc. Over the years somehow I forgot and thought it was a combo router and modem.
Then when I finally had a problem, I insisted to customer support I had done many power cycles already. They scheduled a tech to come out, but I realized my mistake before it went that far at least.
A power cycle fixed the modem, of course.
I was actually able to demonstrate the issue in person, and everyone was scratching their heads trying to figure out what was going on.
I decided to try factory resetting it as a hail mary... and instantaneously I got a perfectly functioning ADSL connection.
It would have been far less embarrassing for me to have thought to try that and make the effort at home. lol
ISP Support: Hi do you have a dial tone?
Me: No we don't have a land line phone at all and haven't for years
ISP Support: Can you please check your land line phone and let me know if you have a dial tone?
Me: I. HAVE. LINE. SYNC.
ISP Support: Yes but your line might not be connected yet. I need to know if you have a dial tone.
Me: ...
Me: drives 5km to the nearest shop that sells telephone handsets
Me: <twhoo hoours layter> YES. WE. HAVE. A. DIAL. TONE.
ISP Support: Okay so it looks like there's an outage in your area which is affecting your connection.
Them: Don’t close the ticket, I hadn't had a chance to check that yet.
Having bots close issues, accompanied by a rude automated message is often contra-productive. It would be fine to instead post a reminder in the issue, asking for an update like shown in the example:
Me: Just checking in to see if this is resolved?
So many software projects close bugs with bots, and they have an unrealistically rosy picture of how bug-free their software is.
If you're moving fast enough that you don't have time to close them manually, you're moving too fast (and breaking too much).
Take a look at this issue to see what it takes to keep something open: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/issues/41...
(not especially proud of my reactions there, but I hate being abused, even by robots.)
If I received a bug like that I would immediately think why are you telling me this... just fix it yourself and share your fix if you want. I probably have higher expectations from my users. You give the software away now they want you to fix it for them.
Then you're part of the problem.
I am far less equipped to handle a bug like this than you'd think. It would take me so much more work and time than asking someone who already knows the project and how to work on it.
If I did this for every bug I reported, I wouldn't have a job because I wouldn't have any time left for one.
You know, this is also my issue with Linux. The attitude is generally that if you want to run Linux, you are expected to do anything you need completely on your own, including fixing bugs. This is why macOS is my preferred operating system. (Not that I can run it right now...)
I'm of course not entitled to anything from you (or anyone), but the one thing I won't do is fix it myself.
I don't really want to be a hacker right now. I've tried. I can be, but it rarely pays off for me. Not even financially, just emotionally.
I've seen places where tickets were not allowed to be re-opened. If a ticket was closed for any reason at all besides a misclick, a new ticket had to be opened with a link to the old ticket if necessary.
This is the real problem an automated close addresses. They are are afraid to tell their customers this.
I've started replying to it with "No updates here." to reset the timer.
I noticed I do exactly this when troubling shooting problems with LLMs!
He'd do one thing, report that it still didn't work. I'd ask if he did the other four things. He'd do the next thing, report that it still didn't work, etc.
God only knows how much that department was paying him.
1. Customer describes the problem 2. You get the problem, parsed by the model, including a summary and a suggestion what could help. 3. You write "do that 3 things" 4. The model tells the customer to do the 1st, then the 2nd and so on 5. The model reminds the customer in intervals that things are not completed 6. the model notifies you after the 3 things are done and the issue is still there.
Give the user a checklist instead of just freeform text -- where they can check off the three individual things to try. When they've checked them all off, they can go back to the well for another response from support.
I was punushed for "leaving" the game, banned for a couple weeks, and sent an obnoxious email about my bad behaviour. I reached out to them on customer support handfuls of times and was always given a list of three steps such as "upgrading graphics drivers", "ensuring i disable my firewall", "using a pc with high enough specs" (my machine is ridiculously overspecd) and things like that. I would follow the three obviously pointless steps, and then be given another set of obviously unrelated steps. This went on about five times over a month.
At some point I just told them, look im a fucking game developer, give me a log dump tool, or a build with debug symbols and I will fix it myself, and finally a real human showed up and actually sent me one. I recreated the bug and sent log captures but they wouldnt let me help beyond that. Then at the end they still scolded me for "leaving" the game.
I dont blame the average person for expecting customer support to be unhelpful or a robot by default, and not following steps.
And very focused responses in terms of action items.
You might think of 3 things to say, check, but sadly 90% of the people you respond to with a list will behave like they read just one of them. Sadly this also leads to dragging things out for everyone who can handle more than one thing at a time :(