James's Weblog

My official job title at Sony was “Developer Technical Support Engineer”. I answered programming questions from third-party software developers.

For some reason, I expected programmers to be smarter than the average bear. At the very least, I expected them to know how to ask reasonably intelligent questions, since programmers are on the other side of the fence when their own users submit questions and bug reports.

Boy, was I wrong.

We received a number of emails that looked like:

FunctionFoo() doesn’t work.

to which I’d have to reply with:

Thank you for reporting this issue to us. However, we are unable to reproduce your problem; to speed up our investigation, please provide more information about:

• what specific model you’re using (Sony has a lot of models)
• whether you’re using a physical device or an emulator
• exactly why you think FunctionFoo() doesn’t work (what do you expect to happen, and what actually happens?)
• exactly what arguments you pass to FunctionFoo()

Please provide a snippet of code to reproduce this problem if possible.

(Actually, I usually was a little less polite.)

Even when people did submit code snippets, for inexplicable reasons they too often thought it was easier to retype their code rather than to copy-and-paste it, hence introducing new errors into their code or sometimes removing the actual ones.

In retrospect, it’s not too surprising we received the sorts of questions we did. The smart people usually were able to solve their problems on their own. They also knew that Sony’s technical support services had an abysmal reputation and to avoid them at all costs.