Re: The <whatever> developer syndrome

"Aaron J. Seigo" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.kde.cafe
Message-ID <[email protected]>
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On Thursday 09 October 2003 05:43, Tink wrote:
> Sorry Steve, I don't agree with you on this one. I own lots of
> commercial and shareware software and I have never ever been called
> names, insulted or humiliated by the their customer service, helpdesk
> or developers feedback. Whenever I mail them a question or suggestion
> I always receive a email back with a polite answer like 'thanks for
> your suggestion we will/will not consider it for our next release'.
> or at least a message the will look into the problem.

two reasons for this:

 a) it's almost never the actual developers who deal with these requests, but 
people whose job it is to triage with the public. failing to do the job well 
(which includes not pissing off the caller =) results in the loss of their 
job and liveliehood

 b) the people who do this triage, even in the cases when it is the engineers/
developers, they are generally trained how to do deal with people on the 
phone or via email.

> It's my experience that in the Open Source world as a user you seem
> to be fair game and inuslt/being rude/humiliate users is accepted
> behavior. When I complain about answers or comments I received
> shoulders a shrugged or people smirk because they think it's funny.

unfortunately, this happens way to often, i agree =( 

i hope one day we'll have people who can and will stand between the users and 
the developers in Free Software projects, both for the reasons you note as 
well as to stem the rising tide of users from deluging the developers. i 
think there was a looong thread on that very topic some time ago on this very 
list =)

i don't know if it will happen spontaneously via volunteers, since the people 
who could do such things well tend not to care much to do so. it may end up 
being a service companies provide the community, though...

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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