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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> Back when I worked on .net we had fewer than 50 people maintaining a product that shipped to over a billion machines. If you opened an issue on github we'd usually reply that day.

It depends on an org's priorities and what gets put on someone's reviews.

During one of the years when I worked on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone!) we had an objective handed down from on high that we were to spend so many hours a week on customer support forums helping people out.

Well, for that year, customers all around the web got great support right from engineers! I got to paste lots of positive feedback from end users in to my yearly review, and I felt great about it!

If Google cared about supporting Flutter as an Open Source project, they'd make the health of the open source project one of the measurements going into employee reviews at the end of the year.

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Totally– This was in the early days of open source .net, when it was still called .net core. We had just moved onto GitHub and I don’t think microsoft had quite figured out how to manage that organizationally. There is a point of time there where the fastest way to reach an engineer was not to go through a tier one contract that you pay microsoft millions of dollars for, but instead to just open an issue on the GitHub. I doubt that’s the case anymore.

> There is a point of time there where the fastest way to reach an engineer was not to go through a tier one contract that you pay microsoft millions of dollars for, but instead to just open an issue on the GitHub. I doubt that’s the case anymore.

Historically when MS was filled with software nerds, the fastest way was to post on an online forum!

Sadly those days seem long gone. It doesn't feel like Microsoft empowers employees to really reach out and help customers anymore.

I do remember responding to those Tier One support contract requests. IMHO that was a better system than what the large tech companies do now, which is basically just ignore customers no matter what.

That’s still very much the case today, BUT you absolutely need to do your legwork beforehand (e.g. include a copypastable program that reproduces the problem and as thorough an analysis as you can do) otherwise your thread will go poorly… (and plenty of regulars in the dotnet repos aren’t exactly the forgiving type). Compare that to what you get with a Support contract: you can be a non-technical person in Sales or the C-Suite or whatever and they’ll hold-your-hand to guide you through the troubleshooting/diagnosis/repro process - and if the issue is an actual bug in MS’ code then at least you get your ticket’s fee/credits refunded.

———-

Unrelated-but-related: An LLM+multimodal “AI” would be fantastic for walking nontechnical users through the issue-reporting process. I’d wager the number-one problem in tech-support today is dealing with “It doesn’t work”-type tickets which necessitates having to interrogate the user/customer/victim to get the details out - but if an AI agent (with screen-reading abilities) handles that (without a single audible sigh or facepalm) then that’s a win for everyone.

…now if only StackOverflow had that.

It really depends on the product. I don't know about .NET, but it's still the case for anything to do with VSCode, for example.

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