{"id":48,"date":"2004-04-24T03:02:57","date_gmt":"2004-04-24T11:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=48"},"modified":"2009-12-05T03:45:48","modified_gmt":"2009-12-05T11:45:48","slug":"stories-from-sony-part-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2004\/04\/24\/stories-from-sony-part-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories from Sony (Part 5)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My official job title at Sony was &#8220;Developer Technical Support Engineer&#8221;.  I answered programming questions from third-party software developers.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Boy, was I wrong.<\/p>\n<p>We received a number of emails that looked like:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<code>FunctionFoo()<\/code> doesn&#8217;t work.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>to which I&#8217;d have to reply with:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThank 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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>what specific model you&#8217;re using (Sony has a <em>lot<\/em> of models)<\/li>\n<li>whether you&#8217;re using a physical device or an emulator<\/li>\n<li>exactly why you think <code>FunctionFoo()<\/code> doesn&#8217;t work (what do you expect to happen, and what actually happens?)<\/li>\n<li>exactly what arguments you pass to <code>FunctionFoo()<\/code><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Please provide a snippet of code to reproduce this problem if possible.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Actually, I usually was a little less polite.)<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>In retrospect, it&#8217;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&#8217;s technical support services had an abysmal reputation and to avoid them at all costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My official job title at Sony was &#8220;Developer Technical Support Engineer&#8221;. 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-sony"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}