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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy to fix it."

It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.

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Absolutely. People nag our customer service until they get redirected to us (software engineers). When you finally spend expensive time looking into their issue, finding the root cause on their end, take the time to explain it in detail, more often than not the answer is among the lines of "couldn't be bothered to read your response, it still doesn't work, fix it!".

I love software development. I love building both simple and complex systems. But users often suck, and honestly sometimes even the people you're making software for suck. I just want people to be grateful for what I'm doing and I honestly find that lacking a bit in our field.

Same in many industries.

I have friends who are restaurateurs and people are often extremely ungrateful, demanding and straight up mean.

Most don't earn a lot, margins are slim and people are late, you have to perform 100% for each dish, then people don't show up, get mad when arriving late, want well done when they say rare, or think the chef can just magically change the recipes to accommodate bizarre allergies or lifestyle choices when juggling 20 dishes at a time with a kitchen that off course has been prepped to the max and a few dollars on the brink of bankruptcy.

Ie. people are just people. Better get used to it, same with employees.

I have so many insane stories about this personally.

I once made a PDF processing tool for a company that saved them a lot of time, was pretty expensive and worked brilliantly until it "definitely broke" and i used 1 stressful month back and fourth figuring out why until i saw it was an employe that always "personalised" the PDF's with cute emojis, saved it before sending it further up the chain actively corrupting it so TOC and links were destroyed because of an old version of Acrobat Reader - this was after i asked 10 times if anyone tampered with it in any way.

It's always some human process, organisation, idiosyncrasy or politics taking up 80% of the time while 20% is spent on the actual work.

I find that after about 15 years of it I have a pretty good intuition for when it’s a ‘me’ problem versus an external one.

Definitely a problem on my end sometimes, but usually i'll figure that out if i just grind hard enough, the crazy time sinks are almost always from miscommunication somewhere in some org.

Customer service for software should be high skilled and paid correspondingly. They should be able to take a customers project and reproduce the issue and likely answer the issue without involving software dev. I worked under a place that operated like this and thought that the issues we did see were legitimate and it fostered a desire to help the customer rather than resent them. Customer service was not easy there.

It's the same with many things. Hotel users suck sometimes, restaurant users suck sometimes, even museum users suck sometimes. Some people are grateful, some people think you're the hostile one.

I stay away from "civilians", i.e. companies that do not already have an IT department tasked with software development. They do not know how software works and refuse to meet the most basic requirements for learning how to use software or for entering data.

Agree, the thing I hate most is people saying that it's "not user friendly", not realizing that it might be a subjective thing, and it's a very generic way of putting it, and how hard it is to satisfy hundreds of idiotic conflicting requirements. And most of all that it's them not wanting to put any effort in learning a new tool and asking developers to smoothen every possible use case, which is impossible.

That and there's essentially no respect for the need to make existing software better. Product owners want feature upon feature and usually aren't interested in actual UX polish as long as the design looks pretty enough. Software engineers usually either don't have much power to push back against this or, if they do, they tend to be spineless.

By and large, we are not doing a good job, and we are not often allowed to actually do a good job. Modern software frustrates me to no end, and in the last few years I've been noticing more non-technical folks getting frustrated. Everyone expects apps and websites to randomly fail in stupid ways or do things in ways that are not intuitive. I barely want to tell anyone I'm a software engineer at this point because it's embarrassing.

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