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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

The most shocking part of this to me is that someone had the time and knowledge to reply to this. Is this common in any companies anywhere still? In my experience customer support usually knows nothing about the product, they are there to read off a script and maybe authorize a repair/replacement. That you'd get a reply from someone who understands thermal requirements for sterilisation sounds almost surreal.

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If you look at the end, you’ll see the letter was signed by an “Assistant Product Manager.” In tech we might call that position “Junior Product Owner” or “Technical Product Manager.” It’s exactly the position I’d expect to either have the answers, or have good enough relations with engineering to get the answers.

My dad had various Plant Manager and Production Superintendent roles at Goodyear for many years. He could tell you exactly how each machine the factory operated, and why, and what the functional tradeoffs were of different designs. He had a Master’s in engineering, which again is a common path to this sort of role even in tech — join as a capable engineer, learn the product and industry, and somewhere along the way learn that you have either talent or interest in management or communication.

Author sent the suggestion to the marketing, marketing forwarded it to engineers and the engineers took that personally. It was sort of like Torvalds C++ response.

I had to Google, and I think this is what is meant with "Torvald's C++ response": http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

My UPS will occasionally go on battery because the incoming line voltage crosses it's "too-high" threshold (127V). I sent the power company a dump of the logs and requested they adjust the tap on my house's transformer.

No response, and I'm pretty sure I'm on their "this guy is a crank" list now.

Most of the time consumer dont interact with the companies that are doing the "Real" production. Mostly stores, distributor, wholesaler, or White Label companies. Normally these entities are created only for marketing and sales. So most of the time they dont give a damn.

Real Product companies tends to take these things seriously. Or at least try to explain these sort of things.

But that is only limited to small -medium , family ran or private companies. Once you get into large public companies there are things that can not be said without first clearing with legal.

If you ask support questions of AWS, you often get connected directly to the engineers responsible for the product, who are able to hunt down the cause of quirks for you by direct reference to their code.

What impresses me the most about this is the quality of triage required to pass just the questions that really need it on to the engineers to avoid oversaturating their bandwidth. I got connected to them almost immediately.

Well yes, maybe I worded my question incorrectly. I work at a games studio and if we need to, we can get direct access to the engineers working directly on the Xbox firmware and ask them questions. It's possible.

But I'm also 100% certain that if someone sent a random letter to Microsoft offering advice on the design of their Xbox console, it wouldn't even make it to their engineers, much less actually get a response from anyone within the department.

You might be able to get a response like this today if you mention the brand on Twitter - that's usually a more marketing-oriented support channel.

Yes, you could tell this letter was very dated and not just from the type. I don't think you'd get a response like this at all these days (if at all).

Maybe if the brand hooked into it as a marketing effort they might publish a response all over their socials, but you'd certainly not a private reply.

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