Comment by AngryData

Comment by AngryData 7 days ago

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I use to report bugs all the time with details of the bug and what I was doing and if possible how to cause it. But then when you encounter the same bugs years later doing some very common task that you momentarily forgot to do your work around for, it made me wonder why I was wasting my time reporting it. These days I rarely report bugs unless it is brand new software released a few weeks ago at most, or a brand new release of older software with a new bug. If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed. So why waste the time? Im not getting paid for it, it likely won't be fixed, and 49/50 bugs I encounter are things that seem impossible to miss with any real QC.

Doing decent bug reports as a user most of the time it feels like following the turnip truck to town picking up turnips that fell off the truck, giving them to the farmer, but knowing they will likely be thrown in the trash because they didn't care about them to start with. If they did they would have made sure to not overload the truck to start with and not be obviously dropping so many turnips on the side of the road and leaving them there.

handsclean 7 days ago

It depends on the company. I’d never dream of reporting a bug to Apple, they don’t care. I think your turnip truck analogy applies there. On the other hand, iA Writer consistently replies thoughtfully and usually fixes the bug.

It’s so important to treat companies individually instead of just according to some blanket impression of the world. Individual treatment means good companies benefit and grow, while blanket treatment actually actively rewards bad behavior: a company that invests in quality will bear the cost while you share the benefit with the competition, while a company that treats you worse will reap the savings while you take out your frustration on the competition, too.

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  • throwaway81523 7 days ago

    Then there are the ones who send you a detailed response trying to convince you that it isn't a bug, when it definitely is one. I've switched programs over that, not because the bug itself was that important, but because I don't like running code that I've established to be written by boneheads.

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  • al_borland 4 days ago

    I submitted a feature request to Apple to allow silencing the ringer for anyone who isn’t in my Contacts list. A year later with the next major update, the “Silence Unknown Callers” feature came to iOS. It appears it worked, either that or it was just a wild coincidence. Of course many other feature requests I’ve submitted over the years still do not exist, such as a global toggle for explicit vs clean music (when it’s just me I always want the original version, but if there are kids in the car, I want an easy way to clean everything up).

    I know someone else who has called Apple’s support line and spoken with engineers on bugs that were uncovered. He then got follow up emails to install the latest macOS update as it contained a fix to the bug he stumbled across.

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  • sebk 6 days ago

    Counter-anecdotally, I reported two WebAuthn issues to Apple in separate instances and both were immediately fixed in the next patch version of iOS/Mac OS. In both cases first line support had little understanding of the issue but were very good at following process, trusting me, calling me back to keep me updated, and escalating to engineering as necessary.

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    • vsl 6 days ago

      That’s security though, not mere bugs.

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  • tobr 7 days ago

    > I’d never dream of reporting a bug to Apple, they don’t care.

    One of the few issues I’ve reported to them was promptly responded to and fixed, but that was probably because it had privacy implications.

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    • zerkten 6 days ago

      I've done the same with Windows, but I had a unique bug with Storage Spaces and did some debugging to identify driver issues to include with the report. I guess the reason it was fixed was because there was similar feedback without the debugging on the Windows Feedback app and because the blast radius was small. It was just one .sys file, but even then Storage Spaces is relatively contained.

      Compare that to any GUI-related issue. Almost every surface has some kind of unsupported/unexpected hooking or reliance on unchanging elements because some company has built a tool that integrates. They've then sold this to Fortune 500s who explode if Windows blows up their tool. This makes the startup cost for fixing many things very expensive.

      If you report issues related to higher profile/usage functionality then you are less likely to get traction because:

      * They know about the issue already, but it's a really hard to fix for some reason which may not be obvious to you. All stakeholders are not equal in the decision process hence compatibility concerns win in some situations.

      * Even if they decide to fix it, a huge amount of effort has to go into scheduling the fix in a release. Some authority may agree to go fix it and everyone is excited. That's just the start of a painful process to implement and test the fix.

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selcuka 7 days ago

> If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed

Yep. That has always been the general industry sentiment [1]:

> Here’s another bug that’s not worth fixing: if you have a bug that totally crashes your program when you open gigantic files, but it only happens to your single user who has OS/2 and who, for all you know, doesn’t even use large files. Well, don’t fix it. Worse things have happened at sea. Similarly I’ve generally given up caring about people with 16 color screens or people running off-the-shelf Windows 95 with no upgrades in 7 years. People like that don’t spend much money on packaged software products.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fix...

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  • tonyedgecombe 7 days ago

    You missed the important part:

    >But mostly, it’s worth fixing bugs. Even if they are “harmless” bugs, they may reduce the reputation of your company and your product, which, in the long run, will have a significant impact on your earnings. It’s hard to overcome the reputation of having a buggy product.

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    • RyanHamilton 6 days ago

      I wish that was the case. I suffered Crowdstrike being force installed upon all servers at a previous firm. After every system update it would "lose" it's configuration and proceed to try scanning every attached drive, some of which were in the petabytes. It's inefficient scanning process consumed 70% plus CPU and caused service outages for some users. Each time we'd ask for configuration to be added to ignore certain mount points, each time it would get turned on again. The only thing that saved us was distributing the service over multiple servers in different regions so that their updates were staggered. We spent >5% of team effort for a few years fighting Crowdstrike.

      Just under a year ago they caused a global outage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...). I thought, aha finally they will pay for their sloppy software. Then I checked the share price today, it's up 20% in the last year. If a cyber security company can cause one of the largest global outages ever and go relatively unpunished, I'm not surprised some firms are not fixing bugs. Very disappointing.

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    • selcuka 6 days ago

      I didn't miss it. That's the serious part, after Joel Spolsky sarcastically explains what companies usually do.

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pavel_lishin 7 days ago

I've reported bugs in a few projects. In my experience, the smaller the team behind the software, the more likely your bug will be fixed.

I think I've reported bugs to Bloomz (the awful communication app my school uses), jpmonette/feed (the node/typescript RSS feed generation library), and I think at one point I reported one to Newsblur, and they all got fixed.

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  • al_borland 4 days ago

    This has been my experience as well.

    I submitted a bug report on Things To Get Me (an Amazon wishlist alternative) on a holiday weekend, fully not expecting to hear anything until at least Monday. It wasn’t anything too major. Within the hour I not only had a response, but a change was pushed to prod after a little back and forth with the developer.

    A couple years ago I signed up for write.as and the founder/ceo reached out to have video chat just to see how things were going or if there was anything I’d want to see in the future.

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_345 7 days ago

Yeah... unfortunately this is how it is at my company which is a startup, I reported so many bugs that just got ignored and it can be demotivating to see the same bugs still in our app months later that could've been fixed in 15 minutes

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vonunov 6 days ago

I've had the opposite experience reporting a bug on Telegram. But it was a particularly thorough report (windbg and all) and if that's what makes the difference, it seems like an unrealistic thing to expect of most users.

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