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Comment by bitcartel | Hacker News Reader

Is it really though?

Registered developers can already submit code level problems[1], there are official developer forums and bugs can be filed with Radar.

Meanwhile at WWDC, it's a developer scrum to get a 15 minute slot with an engineer and walk him/her through code they've never seen before.

From my experience, engineers do their best but they have always looked somewhat tired, hungry and distracted. All things given, I'm not sure it's the best environment to solve non-trivial problems, although it is nice to put a face to a name.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/submit/

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DTS is really bad. If you have a seriously difficult problem (and not just a preference for spending $50 instead of searching with Google) then it's extremely difficult to get a useful response. You never get to talk directly to an engineer, but rather go through a DTS intermediary. The whole process is slow and painful and almost always results in something along the lines of, "You shouldn't do that," or, "That's not possible, file a bug."

I've always had an easy time getting access to engineers. I hear a lot of people don't, so it must vary a lot depending on what topics you're after.

> DTS is really bad.

Maybe I was lucky. ~One year ago I had a problem with one of the Apple frameworks in conjunction with sandboxing and filled a DTS request. It took some time but the guy that I had contact with was very competent - so I guess it was an actual engineer. That or your average DTS intermediary will talk about disassembly listings with you.

Yes, the process was pretty slow but it was not painful IMHO.

Coincidentally I had asked in #macdev on freenode first and was greeted with some snarky remarks how I must be wrong as the reviewers know what they do ...

It does occasionally go well, but I would say that, yes, you were lucky. I've tried DTS many times and never had it be very useful, not even when it was clearly a bug on Apple's side that they would want to fix soon.

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