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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?

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My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.

And by guessing, we mean grasping wildly at nonsense.

Why are people booing you, you're right.

People are booing because HN commenters generally kind of meritocratic and lowkey idolize company leaders. It's an unpopular opinion here, but executives aren't in their positions because they are smarter than everyone else, or better at business, or have better product ideas. They're generally there for less meritocratic reasons: They went to the right prep school and college, they were friends with the right people already in the executive class, they rubbed elbows with other business leaders in MBA school, they golf at the right country clubs. Then they get that sweet VP title and fail upward all the way to retirement.

There's nothing wrong with guessing, just be clear that it's a guess and not an attempt to represent known facts. I don't know if the comment got edited or just reads more clearly on a second pass, but at first it felt ambiguous.

Because trying to explain stupid decisions is annoying and listening to endless complaints is demoralizing.

Source: worked AppleCare

A tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.

Doesn't make much sense to me? How would they argue that? "Don't ban third party HDDs, you'll earn less on sales and you won't have to pay me". Wut

Evidently profitability went down due to the change, so if anything they were fighting for their jobs by opposing it. (If it is indeed true that they were opposing it internally, still not sure where exactly that claim is coming from.)

It depends on who their target audience is. VMware for example have strict hardware compatibility lists because their target audience is big enterprise. But Synology being a consumer NAS, this decision was perhaps not wise. They're sort of standing in two markets. They need to make a decision as to which products are enterprise and which are consumer.

I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict HCL.

I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in my case I do this kind of thing out of principle.

Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.

In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.

You may enjoy this classic Raymond Chen post:

Blow the dust out of the connector

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...

> I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.

That's how we all benefit. But if a company wants to benefit more than you, they can. That's how enshittification works.

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