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Comment by angry_moose | Hacker News Reader

> Additionally, Red Hat support is so bad these days. It almost reminds me of Microsoft Technet forums of the past. Random 'techs' offering copy-paste solutions and the same bad information.

Yeah, that's been my experience. We had a bad driver package from them completely hose one of our prod systems.

It took 3 days and multiple calls from our CTO to get anyone to seriously look at the issue despite being on the top level support level and it being a Severity 1 issue. The whole "Responses within X hours" thing is a joke when all they give you is "Have you tried rebooting?" or "We're still looking into it" (technically those are response!).

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Well that explains a lot. Historically, the basic idea as I understood it was that you could have the software for free (CentOS) and they didn't really mind because they knew they were selling support. If the support is worthless, then they have to try and squeeze money out of the software, which explains their behavior.

Squeezing money out of effectively unsupported software is not sustainable.

Sounds like someone is trying to get their investment back before dumping the whole thing.

Dumping? This is IBM we're talking about. They'll ratchet up the price to fewer and fewer customers, trying to keep themselves in that pocket where they're too useful and expensive to move away from, but still able to hold the irons to their customers.

Nothing you said managed to disagree with what I said.

They bought it, now they’re sucking the marrow out.

The SLA is to respond within X hours, not resolve. So when the SE sends an email that says: "I'm the owner of the case and will reach out after looking at the notes." They have complied with the SLA.

It is revolting to be blocked and not get any help, everyone is anxious, specially when your main product is down (money), but seriously, I just think nobody reads their SLAs and just complains until someone resolves. I suppose it’s a rule of life no one reads terms (yet try to enforce them somehow), but usually their attitude give me the creeps.

And then they have another X hours to respond again

I feel like this trains them too. Like, real issues will have a CTO on the phone, so if there's no CTO on the phone by all means ignore the ticket.

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