Comment by RajT88

Comment by RajT88 6 days ago

11 replies

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> Since the Microsoft response to the bug was denying and gaslighting the affected people

Well. I wouldn't go that far. Any busy dev team is incentivized to make you run the gauntlet:

1. It's not an issue (you have to prove to me it's an issue)

2. It's not my issue (you have to prove to me it's my issue)

3. It's not that important (you have to prove it has significant business value to fix it)

4. It's not that time sensitive (you have to prove it's worth fixing soon)

It was exactly like this at my last few companies. Microsoft is quite a lot like this as well.

If you have an assigned CSAM, they can help run the gauntlet. That's what they are there for.

See also: The 6 stages of developer realization:

https://www.amazon.com/Panvola-Debugging-Computer-Programmer...

Twirrim 6 days ago

Even when you have an expensive contract with Microsoft and a direct account manager to help you run the gauntlet you still end up having to deal with awful support people.

Years ago at a job we were seeing issues with a network card on a VM. One of my coworkers spent 2-3 days working his way through support engineer after support engineer until they got into a call with one. He talked the engineer through what was happening. Remote VM, can only access over RDP (well, we could VNC too, but that idea just confuses Microsoft support people for some reason.)

The support engineer decided that the way to resolve the problem was to uninstall and re-install the network card driver. Coworker decided to give the support engineer enough rope to hang themselves with, hoping it'd help him escalate faster: "Won't that break the RDP connection?" "No sir, I've done this many times before, trust me" "Okay then...."

Unsurprisingly enough, when you uninstall the network card driver and cause the instance to have no network cards, RDP stops working. Go figure.

Co-worker let the support engineer know that he'd now lost access, and a guess why. "Oh, yeah. I can see why that might have been a problem"

Co-worker was right though, it did finally let us escalate further up the chain....

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ziddoap 6 days ago

>If you have an assigned CSAM

That's an unfortunate acronym. I assume you mean Customer Service Account Manager.

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  • RajT88 6 days ago

    Customer Success Account Manager. And I would agree - it is very unfortunate.

    Definitely in my top 5 questionable acronym choices from MSFT.

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thatfunkymunki 6 days ago

Your reticence to accept the term gaslighting clearly indicates you've never had to interact with MSFT support.

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  • RajT88 6 days ago

    On the contrary, I have spent thousands of hours interacting with MSFT support.

    What I'm getting at with my post is the dev teams support has to talk to, which they just forward along their responses verbatim.

    A lot of MSFT support does suck. There are also some really amazing engineers in the support org.

    I did my time in support early in my career (not at MSFT), and so I understand well it's extremely hard to hire good support engineers, and even harder to keep them. The skills they learn on the job makes them attractive to other parts of the org, and they get poached.

    There is also an industry-wide tendency for developers to treat support as a bunch of knuckle-dragging idiots, but at the same time they don't arm them with detailed information on how stuff works.

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    • RHSeeger 6 days ago

      > What I'm getting at with my post is the dev teams support has to talk to, which they just forward along their responses verbatim.

      But the "support" that the end user sees is that combination, not two different teams (even if they know it's two or more different teams). The point is that the end user reached out for help and was told their own experiences weren't true. The fact that Dave had Doug actually tell them that is irrelevant.

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      • RajT88 6 days ago

        I guess I see your point.

        If we're going to call it gaslighting, then gaslighting is typical dev team behavior, which of course flows back down to support. It's a problem with Microsoft just like it is a problem for any other company which makes software.

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