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Search - "customer service"
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Today I received the best bug report I could've ever asked for..
Received an email from a member of our customer service centre containing a description of the bug they'd found and not only did it contain the steps to reproduce the bug, but a goddamn video of him reproducing the suspected bug!
The greatest feeling when the client decides to take time to make your life that little bit easier24 -
Me: good day, how can I help you?
Client: *explains issue*
Me: alright, let's take a loo.... *AACHOOOO*
.
.
M: my apologies sir, that came out of nowhe... *ACHOOO*
M: do you have a second sir? My apologies!
C: sure man take your time 😁
*30 seconds later, nose seems to have calmed down*
M: back I am, apologies for the inconvenience!
C: no problem, it happens!
M: where was I?.... Right, I was going t...
*ACHOOOOOOOOOOO*
*ACHOOOOOOO*
AH... AH... AAAAH..... ACHOOOOO*
M: I'm very sorry, I'm going to put you through to a collegue!
*puts through to collegue*
*goes to bathroom*
.
.
*returns to desk*
*tringgggg*
Me: good afternoon sir, how may I hel... *A-MOTHERFUCKING-CHOOOOO* (thinking: oh for fucking fucks sake)
C: bless you!
M: thank you! Apologies, I seem to be having a snee.. *CHOOOOOOOO*
.
.
.
*sniffs a few times*
- zing attack.
*collegue yells at me to transfer my call*
*transfers call*
Me: thanks man, idk what's wrong with me hahah... *ACHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*
OH FUCKING HELL 😠26 -
Caller: Hi, our printer is not working.
Customer Service: What is wrong with it?
Caller: Mouse is jammed.
Customer Service: Mouse? Printers don’t have a mouse.
Caller: Mmmmm? Oh really? I will send a picture….13 -
Just called Asus for a problem with my router, went to send them my systemlog.txt for analysis
"Oh we don't have an email you can send that to"
Me: "(me calling bullshit) let me talk to the tech team.."
*Get transferred*
"Hello this is the supervisor"
Me: "fml"
"Ya we don't have an email you can send that to, but we can use a different departments verification services to get a file from you, has to be a picture though"
Me: "What? I got a .txt file here, I just want to get it to you, does it really have to be a picture?"
"Has to be a picture or a PDF, we can't take txt files"
Me: "fkin.. srsly? Fine"
I can't believe Asus's system srsly. I think it's for virus protection, but viruses can be embedded in both picture formats and PDF, but not in txt. So wtf is going on lol15 -
Customer: IT is completely useless! I’m getting PORN ADS on my work computer!? This is ridiculous!!!
Friend: Oh that’s not good, perhaps your computer has a virus of some sort let me take a look!
Friend takes a look and sees that the porn ads were all provided by google ad service, they weren’t related to a virus.
Friend: so, you don’t have a virus, but so that you know google gathers metrics on the sites you visit so that it can target ads at you better. Looks like that’s what’s happening here.
Customer: .............13 -
So I've got a Linux related job (or, starting at monday). When people ask me what my new position is called, I'll of course tell! Well, I stutter sometimes in my native language. Especially with the letter L.
"so what's your new position?"
"Lllllll-lllll-llllllllllllllllllll"
*mother of god*
"lllllllllllllllllllllll-llllllllllllll*
*OH FFS*
"Llllllllllll-llllllllllllllllllll-lllllllinux support engineer!"
*FUCKING FINALLY!*
"Hey man, you got a new job I heard, what's your new position?"
*please work*
"Lllllllllll-lllllllllllllllll-llllllllllllllllllllll*
*MOTHERFUCKER*
"Lllllllll-lllllllllllllllllllinux support engineer!"
"ey dude, what's your new position? Heard you got a new job!"
*alright let's do this better*
"gonna do stuff with servers and customer service!"
"Ah cool! What system do they run on their servers?"
No. 😡28 -
After countless hours trying to spell my name for customer service over the phone, I made a little webpage that helps me spell words phonetically! 💬
https://dialogue.now.sh37 -
Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).
Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<
-------------
Le wild blackout appears!
-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*
-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!
Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)
-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.
-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]
Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.
Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)
What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.
Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.
I really hate him.20 -
Manager: Does anybody having any money saving ideas?
Dev: By switching our supplier from X to Y we could save $10,000/year and they have much better customer service.
Manager: So? I’m looking more for savings opportunities in the +$100k range. That’s a small idea, I’m looking for *BIG* ideas.
Dev: Do you have any big ideas?
Manager: No, but I really really want to save big money like that. I thought you would have something worthwhile.
Dev: $10,000 still a lot of money
Manager: I guess…. Ok we can do it. But don’t bother me with peanuts like this again.
Dev: ??? You asked me buddy15 -
My experience with Adobe...
(I recently moved to Canada)
Me: I want to give you money. (Tries to pay with Canadian card)
Adobe: Sorry, you have a US account, you must use a US card.
Me: Okay, what are my options to pay with my Canadian card?
Adobe: We have to delete your US account and create a Canadian one.
Me: Okay... Why can't you just switch the country from US to Canada on my account?
Adobe: *bullcrap response*
Me: Okay, delete it and transfer everything.
*Kicks me out of the chat.
*I log back in. Try to reconnect to customer service chat.
Adobe: AdobeID unable to participate in chat.
*I'm 30 minutes into this ordeal
Me: (to myself) I could literally torrent this program in 5 minutes 🤔
Lesson: if a company wants people to not torrent their software make it easier for a willing fucking customer to buy your software!
Since the chat doesn't work anymore, I called customer service and am still on hold.... 😤😤😤
Why does the internet have borders?11 -
Found two awesome domain names (shown as available on namecheap) for the url shortener!
Paid when an error appeared. Contacted the customer service through the live chat.
A bug in their system showed them as available while they're taken.
😭29 -
Fuck open office spaces.
A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.
During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.
Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.
Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.
I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.
I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?
All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....18 -
Caller : Hi, our printer is not working.
Customer Service : What is wrong with it?
Caller : Mouse is jammed..
Customer Service : Mouse......???? Printers don't have a mouse you fool….!
Caller : Mmmmm…??..
Oh really ?...
I will send a picture, see U idiot!😡
😂😂😜😜9 -
What happens when you change the service call center to 100% AI
AI: Hello, this is the After Service center. How may I help you?
Angry customer: Hey! Do you count this as a product? Do you sell this to use it? F*** shit?! Bring the manager now!
AI: Thank you for your response. We will connect you to the Development team.
Angry customer: Uhhhhhh
AI: Hello, this is the development team. Please state your problems.
A bit relaxed customer: Umm, so this product you guys are selling stops working sometimes, so...
AI: We are sorry, but for the product misfunctions, please contact the After Service. We will connect you to After Service.
F***ed out customer: Wait, I just came from the After Service!
AI: Hello, this is the After Service center. How may I help you?
Angry customer who is ready to throw the phone: I said that the product is not working, and I asked to bring the freaking manager in the line!
AI: Thank you for your response. We will connect you to the Development team.
Customer throwing the phone and shouting: F*********************************************************************************************!7 -
Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?
Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)
------
Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.
So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~
------
Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"
Cue Inigo Montoya.
------
Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?
Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."
------
Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."
I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.
------
Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.
------
I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?18 -
We have a customer that runs an extremely strict security program, which disallows any type of outside connection to their servers.
In order to even correspond with them via email you must undergo background checks and be validated. Then you sign an NDA and another "secrecy level" contract.
Today they had a problem, I was the one assigned to fix it. I asked for a screenshot.
We already use an encrypted mail service, which runs via a special VPN that has enough layers of protection to slow down a photon to the speed of a snail.
The customer's sysadmin encrypted the screenshot and sent it to me.
I open the screenshot and....
He runs Windows 10, uses Google Chrome and has Facebook's WhatsApp desktop app flashing orange in the tray.
😐😣😫😖4 -
A few days ago, I had a trashed laptop, lost my wallet with University ID and my debit card, a thesis and a poster not started, and no real content to put on either. I'd need money to get a new univ ID but no debit card. Same ges for buying a laptop. Also homework and shit due. Which required a load of Python.
Fast forward a week.
Laptop on its way, thank PayPal. Got new univ ID. Library loans out laptops. All homeworks done. Even got the replacement fee on my debit card waived by being nice to the customer service person.
I'd like to thank devRant for keeping me sane. And I'd like to say I'm fairly proud of my adulting abilities. They're not stellar, but they're pretty okay.4 -
Although this is gonna sound like bullshit, this happened to me for real. Since that moment I use even more backup services AND I regularly check EVERYTHING.
Had a backup of my important data (still used mainstream services back then) on:
- Hotmail email attachments
- Google Drive
(Both link to another email account).
- A few data backup services
- DVD
- USB
- External HDD.
I wanted to copy some backup data over again:
1. Walk to my staple of HDD's, tried to grab it, somehow missed and knocked the whole fucking pile over. HDD broken.
2. Well fuck, let's go put some of my clothes in the washing machine for clean clothes at study/monday. After this shit being in the washing machine for just a few minutes, I realized my backup USB stick was in one of my pockets, in the washing machine. FUCK. Couldn't stop it so I waited till the end, tried it and well, it wasn't working at all anymore.
Fuck my fucking life slightly right now.
3. *remembers about the backup disc*. I forgot to keep it in its case, very deep scratches and so on, unreadable. FUCKING FUCK.
4. Right, I still have those online services! *tries to login to all of them (including hotmail/gdrive) but forgot the password. Well, let's login to my backup account then (hadn't used that one in years). Account was suspended for some reason.
Started to get really anxious because every online backup service was linked to that email address.
Contacted customer support. They really couldn't restore it because of some issues they weren't allow to tell me. Sorry but I couldn't retain access.
5. Well this is fucked up. Couldn't get into any of the backup/hotmail/gdrive accounts anymore.
I tried contacting their support but never got any replies.
This was the moment I realized I fucked up big fucking time because damn, this stuff at this level hardly happens to anyone.
FUCK.39 -
My mobile phone provider called me and offered me a new contract containing more data volume.
Customer service: 'Your current contract has only 1.5GB data volume. That's not much. With this you can only send 1 or 2 pictures and that's it.'
Me: 'What kind of pictures do you use / send? 😨'11 -
Customer is always right.....
Committed to sustainable productivity..
Misunderstanding between the IT Department Staff member and the Finance Department Staff member in one of the establishments...
User: Hi, our printer is not working.
IT Service: What is wrong with it?
User: The mouse is jammed.
IT Service: Mouse? Are you sure it’s a printer, as they don’t come with a mouse?
User: Do you think I’m stupid? I’m telling you it’s the printer!
IT Service: I'm telling you, it can’t be the printer! They don’t have a mouse!
User: Oh really?... Mmmmm... I’ll send you a picture.
Scroll down...
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The customer is always right.
Listen to him/her and believe what he/she says.
Don’t jump into conclusions!12 -
Applied for a student JetBrains account, i got accepted in less than 12 hours. Thats what I call great customer service!14
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I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.
Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.
That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.
I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.
Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.
Banking logic. I fucking love it.
As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.23 -
Customer service fun!
*remotes in to see customer's browser*
Customer: You can only see my browser window, right?
*now does obligatory scan of the rest of the screen to see _why_ customer felt the need to say that, spots suggestively-named JPGs...*
Me: Yes, ma'am! Only your browser window. You said the issue was...4 -
I can't believe this company.
They want to stop using Certificates because it bothers the customer.
I had to use https because we were using service workers for a PWA.
I tried explaining we need them for the product to work, and also it's a basic security measure.
They were removing the certificates without my knowledge.
I found out because a colleague wanted a way to disable the service worker and asked me for help.
The manager said your not the boss of the company, it's not your company to make decisions.
Just do what they say, he tried to justify the decision from above, I said ok when was the last time you installed a certificate? he said never.
Ok, then what the fuck are you talking about, its 10 minutes to get a certificate letscrypt HELLO.
This company is very hierarchical 1900 style, I'm the person who does innovation in the organization, that's the most fucked up part, they say no to everything.
OMG, I'm going to quit.
There just asking to get hacked, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Is this common or are they morons?17 -
I'm a network engineer. Mom questions my skills when I tell her to just reset the router, but when customer service tells her to, she acts like she's listening to the voice of god.2
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Minimum wage employers and restaurants asking "and why should we hire you?".
You have 40 vacancies in your area for just your company alone.
You're paying $13.25 an hour when only a year ago you were paying $9.75.
Why should we hire you?
F*ck you, pay me, that's why.
You're not f*cking NASA
You're a God damn chain restaurant with a 40% turnover rate, who's employees probably shoot up in the bathroom on the rare occasion they even get a break.
I looked at the guy with all the annoyance I could muster, stared him down for a good five seconds and said. "You pay a few dollars over minimum. You're job is not important enough to even ask that question. Have a nice day." And got up and left.
Dude followed me and stuttered " hold up. I was just..."
But I was already out the door.
You were just what mark? Asking a dumbfuck question as if you had any leverage at all?
Your competitor *across the street* is offering 50 cents *more* per hour, and has guaranteed breaks.
What, did you forget 2008 and how you treated millions of people as disposable? The little part where you and most american industries demanded passion, without pay raises? Promotions without benefits? The jobs that if you worked hard, rather than a promotion or a pay raise, your reward was more work and less hours to finish?
You assholes thought we forgot about that? How you shipped millions of jobs overseas, blamed it on "automation" (chinese and indian slave labor), and then pointed the finger at millions of impoverished people as "lazy" in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and told them "you just got to work harder and smarter!" Or "just get a small loan and create the next google!" from the comfort of your yachts? I'm looking at you bane corp.
No, now the shoes on the other foot motherf*ckers. Hows it feel needing all *us* commoners? "Why should we hire you?"
No, why should *I* WORK FOR YOU?
Cuz I saw THREE dirty tables coming in. A line of people that could be being served. A line that could have been optimized with the proper table count and some simple changes. A menu that doesnt even incentivize your biggest sellers and a dozen other things your store is doing wrong.
Think mark, think!
This is one of those braindead questions employers paying sub $18 an hour ask, because they suffered so much brain drain from years of payola profits from too-big-to-fail wallstreet bailouts, that they forgot they are not king midas, unless they are the king midas of shit, because increasingly everything corporate America touches turns into shit.
And while were on the subject, stopping bringing in outside management to stores. It destroys team cohesion, staff morale, pisses off people *on site* who *actually know* the team, the stores daily activities and processes, and who are better fit for that role. You bring in disinterested outside management, and it's one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen: these smarmy selfcongratulating f*cks who know nothing about the particular store, have no connection to the staff, go on firing sprees or alienation-sprees to hire in friends, fuck up the schedules because again they know nothing about the employees, and then move on after a few years to greener pastures, leaving a barren radioactive wasteland of chain smokers and burnt out staff in their wake.
Dear corporate America, your free ride on the public's good will is over. It's over.
Now you're in the bitch seat. Come sit at my desk and explain to me, EXPLAIN TO ME, why I should sweat and labor to save your shitty company hemorrhaging money like a bleeding crack-addicted hobo dying with a sucking chest wound from a chicago skidrow friday-night drive-by?
You dont deserve it. Your management and company culture is worse than incompetent. It's full of smiley guys expounding about their passion for customer service while giving each other sloppy BJs in broom closets, a veritable cornucopia of cult-like corporate dick suckers *and* dickheads, proclaiming, no...PROFESSING (hence "professional") their undying allegiance and dedication to their corporate family with the intensity of cujo, foaming at the mouth, or Mitt Romney preparing for a photoshoot, plastic smiles and feigned laughs.
Dont forget to wipe your chin, asshole. It's not Ronald McDonald your blowing, but it's definitely not Gordon f*cking Ramsey either.
Would you like fries with that?88 -
My code review nightmare part 3
Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)
Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.
About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."
3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.
Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"
Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"
TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.
At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:
VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."19 -
Adventures in security land.
The “legendary” lead dev authored a ticket that logs raw credentials for a third-party tool we’re using, and logs partially-obscured consumer passwords. His reasoning: “for debugging. And customer service!” And then argued with me over why that’s bad! Seriously?
Then in the release channel, he and the release manager are talking like I’m pestering them with my findings. Things like “I have some Root-induced changes coming” and “Fixed those, but she’ll probably have more...” etc.
Like come on.
I’m even being nice here, but you seriously need to stop screwing this up.
They also didn’t bother merging the fixes into the release branch, so I needed to re-review the entire (large) ticket on its own branch. Doubles the effort since I can’t easily see what changed.
The lead dev also only updated a few of the specs (despite me sending him a list), so there’s a bunch of failing ones now. Makes me unsure if he actually fixed everything.
Maybe I’m just being touchy, but ugh. Freaking annoying people.
At least he owned up to being the author this time instead of saying someone else (who wasn’t in the history...) wrote it. -.-9 -
Yesterday the web site started logging an exception “A task was canceled” when making a http call using the .Net HTTPClient class (site calling a REST service).
Emails back n’ forth ..blaming the database…blaming the network..then a senior web developer blamed the logging (the system I’m responsible for).
Under the hood, the logger is sending the exception data to another REST service (which sends emails, generates reports etc.) which I had to quickly re-direct the discussion because if we’re seeing the exception email, the logging didn’t cause the exception, it’s just reporting it. Felt a little sad having to explain it to other IT professionals, but everyone seemed to agree and focused on the server resources.
Last night I get a call about the exceptions occurring again in much larger numbers (from 100 to over 5,000 within a few minutes). I log in, add myself to the large skype group chat going on just to catch the same senior web developer say …
“Here is the APM data that shows logging is causing the http tasks to get canceled.”
FRACK!
Me: “No, that data just shows the logging http traffic of the exception. The exception is occurring before any logging is executed. The task is either being canceled due to a network time out or IIS is running out of threads. The web site is failing to execute the http call to the REST service.”
Several other devs, DBAs, and network admins agree.
The errors only lasted a couple of minutes (exactly 2 minutes, which seemed odd), so everyone agrees to dig into the data further in the morning.
This morning I login to my computer to discover the error(s) occurred again at 6:20AM and an email from the senior web developer saying we (my mgr, her mgr, network admins, DBAs, etc) need to discuss changes to the logging system to prevent this problem from negatively affecting the customer experience...blah blah blah.
FRACKing female dog!
Good news is we never had the meeting. When the senior web dev manager came in, he cancelled the meeting.
Turned out to be a hiccup in a domain controller causing the servers to lose their connection to each other for 2 minutes (1-minute timeout, 1 minute to fully re-sync). The exact two-minute burst of errors explained (and proven via wireshark).
People and their petty office politics piss me off.2 -
Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?
So, so many. How do I chose?
- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.4 -
The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.
That sounds like a simple query, yeah?
Well.
Here's some background:
We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.
All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.
Here's how signups happen:
Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.
And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:
Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.
Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.
Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!
After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.
It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.
So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!
I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...
just...
errrrgghh9 -
Customer care guys are stupid
Me : yeah, OS crashed. It keeps getting into bios setup saying there's no hard drive detected on this system and no recovery file found as well, what do ?
Him : "well sir, your OS has been corrupted and now you have to buy new licensed one, if you can just give me your location I can help you locate out nearest service centre which will help you install a new licensed instantly"
Me : *WHAT THE ACTUAL TRIPLE FUCK* atleast try to understand the problem first.
Him : No need sir, I already come across this problem and now you have to pay, as I was saying *beep*
*I smashed the phone*
After that I fixed it myself
These low level shit licking faggots need to get themselves fucked in the ass by horses and then apply the same conversation when the intercourse begins with the horse.
Also, if I could be placed in the same customer care cell, I would do better.
So wk62 too I guess3 -
Things that never happen
Customer: I really am happy with the service. The 99.999% availability is great. I completely understand that downtimes are necessary to keep the system up to date....1 -
Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.
You would think.
After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.
Now the real fun begins.
Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.
Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.
After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.
Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.
This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.2 -
After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
My customer service girl just told me that she gonna charge $20 to a client. The client bought one of our web development packages and requested us to create LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Instagram account so he can put those on his restaurant website.
Don't be surprised if I became millionaire around 2020.
// $20 can give us like 5 KFC meals here.13 -
Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?
Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).
After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."
So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.
After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."
After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.
Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.8 -
Fuck you gas company for back billing me 1500...I don't need you...built my own heating system...and with my managed pdu I can switch on remotely so its warm when I get home...so you can shove your heating app up your arse as well11
-
TL;DR
A "friend" is a tech fraud. Faking his resume as a software engineer! Only interested on the salary. This is unfair to all of us putting the hours of effort/practice just to improve our craft! 😠😤
I have a "friend" who is faking his resume, putting fake experiences and putting jargons not even related to tech just to make himself smart. He's using his customer service rep experience to talk confidently. His resume fcking long, 3 pages of fakery. I can't help, but to laugh when he sent it to me.
He has a tech degree, but worked in a BPO industry for 4 years, then recently, he quit. He got jealous with the lucrative software development industry and he wants to relearn coding, as a friend and I like sharing my knowledge, I agreed to guide him in the process.
After 3 moths, he got his first job, but unfortunately he got fired after two weeks because he commited sensitive data to the remote repo.
Then after a month, he got his second job and worked there for 6 months, he still don't know what his doing and always ask me solutions when he is stuck.
He got his 3rd job, remote work with high compensation. Fast forward after 3 months, he only got 1 month of salary, the other 2 wasn't given for unknown reason, my best guess is the company noticed his experience on paper does not match on real life.
Currently, he's working on another remote work with same compensation as before, and he still asks me super simple questions from time to time.
This is so unfair to all the devs who truly deserves the opportunity.20 -
Screw the German Telekom!
I recently got a new home without internet so naturally, I went to an isp, Telekom. I went there a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the personal and the general competence. He told me they would send a technician to check my cable. So I thought great and went home. 1 A week passes, nobody shows up. I then went back to the shop and asked(someone different). He basically told me that such a service must be specifically asked for and a contract has to be signed. I then told
him his colleague told me no such thing, and that the technician should have checked up on my connection last week. He excuses him self and I signed the thingy.
Now you would imagine that this would have worked.
but.
NOOOoooo.
A week came and went and I got pissed. So I went back to the shop the guy from the first try was there. I Asked what happened, he types in his Computer. and. and. and. nothing. Apparently, the previous guy forgot, fucking forgot, to enter my request to their bloody System.
Now I asked if I can Just become a customer.
Guy: Sure, what speed is available in your region?
Me: I don't know...
Guy: Let me check
/Type/ /Type/
Guy: I can't see your speed the technician should have checked.
Me: Um, so, can he check?
Guy: Clearly you don't know what you want
Me:???
Guy:*leaves table*
(shorten but you get the Idea)
At this point, I really wanted to change isp so I went to Vodafone.
Lady comes up to me asks me a bunch of stuff and I explain I would want to change my phone, internet, tv, mobile and my friends mobile(I lost a bet once ^~^) to Vodafone.
What happened next I can't really explain, but she talked to her boss and "cheated" (how she calls it) on Vodafone and got me an AMAZING deal it is cheaper than Telekoms has waay more mobile data, faster Internet and I got a new phone :D.
And guess what she could fucking check, fucking check from here Computer my max internet speed.
I can only hope that the lady got a big fat commission for what she has done.6 -
Fuck big tech companies. Fuck their surveillance capitalism. Fuck their monopolies and anti-competitive bullshit. Fuck their tax dodging. Fuck their fighting against the right to repair. Fuck their worship of revenue above all else. Fuck their 30% cut on everything. Fuck their world-destroying revenue models built on heartless AI and zero customer service. Fuck their automated banning systems with zero explanation as to why the fuck they've banned you, with zero fucking recourse. Fuck their amoral psychopathic CEOs and their fucking space rockets. Fuck all this shit. When I'm done with this IT project I'm fucking done with tech.
Okay I'm done now.14 -
HP sucks because:
shitty hinges,
shitty build quality,
shitty USB ports,
shitty customer service,
shitty website6 -
I cannot wait to leave my job. I love my bosses, but the customer service people are the fucking worst!
Since I'm the only developer day in and day out I hear the same problems of people forgetting how to do so something over and over and over. Then they yell at me because they say I don't train them enough.
I WASTE 8 HOURS A WEEK RETRAINING YOU SHIT HEADS BUT NONE OF YOU TAKE NOTES IN THE MEETINGS!!!! ITS NOT MY FAULT IF YOU THINK YOU PEA SIZED BRIAN WILL REMEMBER ANYTHING!
AND ITS NOT LIKE THE SYSTEM IS HARD! THERE ARE TOOLTIPS AND CUSTOM ERROR MESSAGES THAT YOU JUST CHOOSE NOT TO READ!
I am just so burned out of answer the same damn questions day in and day out3 -
Devs: Hey, what should we do?
A:
provide our SDKs for download as easily as possible so that any potential customer can try it out and see how much better we are compared to our competitors?
Or…
B:
Should we lock our SDKs behind a login where the customer needs to create an account and enter the most amount of private information possible, just in case, then also require to create some security access tokens that he needs to configure in his app to have access to our service via the sdk and also hide all of the documentation behind a login which requires some permission based roles to access and also make the sdks closed source so that it’s a pain in the ass to debug and understand?
Marketing people:
B! Definitely B! Make sure to piss off and annoy our customers as much as humanly possible! -
So my client wants to stick with their current hosting provider (Bell) because the company is "big" and "won't go anywhere anytime soon." I just said, well okay it can't be that bad. Bell charges about 10x more and gives you about 10x less compared to other options, but it's not my money so whatever. Well, Bell has the absolute worst customer service. They have an online support form where I can type in my questions and they will call me within a day to help me. They called me during work hours and I missed the call, so they sent me an email to let me know I missed the call and gave me a number to call. I called and I might as well have called my dog because the support didn't even know what a .htaccess file is. I emailed them back and asked if they could forward my email to someone in the hosting department that could help (because the phone support I got was shit). I got a reply saying they "can't"... yup, they used the word "can't", they can't forward the email and that I would have to call. Is everyone at Bell a fucking dick chugging brainless pile of moldy-ass shit biscuits!? YOU CAN"T SEND AN EMAIL? Turns out they do have a dedicated hosting support email, let's hope the email I send ends up in front of someone at Bell who at least has a slight clue how to use a keyboard.3
-
You guys, I think I know what is it....I think I know why I wanted to be a developer.
It started off innocently enough. I was a young lad in IT. Wide-eyed. Absorbing anything and everything I could. Then, the asshole clients came.....
I would put on my best customer service face on, and address the client as calmly and as respectfully as I could. Reminding myself that their frustration is understandable.
To deal with the increased time dealing with clients took, I developed scripts to help me handle maintenance and keep my head above water. I developed scripts to streamline equipment provisioning for big deployments. I developed scripts to handle other technicians who didn't log-off the phone queue and fucked up our on-call flow. I put in place email rules to sift through the bullshit and time wasters.
I became a developer to streamline and make myself as efficient as possible. But the clients keep nagging. The bullshit keeps coming. The other players get in your fucking way.
There is no end you guys.... THIS IS ONLY TUESDAY. I can't script the passage of time. I'm....I'm.... I need a fucking nap.1 -
Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.
The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.1 -
WHAT FUCKING PAYMENT PROVIDER SENDS ALL THEIR TECHNICAL STAFF ON VACATION?!?!?
Leaving customer service to tell me to "wait until they get back... In three weeks"
Unbelievable, I'm actually thinking there are laws and regulations about this if you are providing money handling services, but the sheer stupidity in itself!!2 -
Most awkward work event/parts story?
There was a girl who worked in customer service, very goth. Un-kept hair, baggy cloths, dark lipstick, etc..etc. At a company holiday party there were several+many people (mostly dudes) asking "Who is that! ... She's HOT!!" etc (you could hear it from various tables), and someone said "That's Stefanie.", then the "Noooo...OMG..."
Apparently she cleaned up nicely (dressed like she was going to a movie premier, very classy). She and a female friend (also attractive, dressed like a million bucks) were sitting close to each together and you could hear more (inappropriate) comments "OMG, are they together!?...that's fucking hot!....".
Mind you, this wasn't a very big venue (and before all of today's woke-ness), I could hear it a few tables away (again, all dudes, customer service and warehouse worker folks), I *know* they could hear it from their table.
It was so bad Stefanie's CS manager talked about in the break room the next day. She wasn't at the holiday party, but the rumors were going wild that day.
<she's in her 60's and I wouldn't want to be on her bad side>
D: "I can't believe they made such a scene. I would have smacked those young men in the face! Stefanie has a boyfriend and Laura is married. They have been best friends since kindergarten, its disgusting what went on. And another thing..."
It was talked about for many years afterward.3 -
During a health and safety course today I was asked to talk about the workspace ergonomics. Part of that course is to make sure everyone knows how to customise their seat, screen, keyboard, etc., so I told everyone to unfold those little feet on the bottom of their keyboards and everyone did... Everyone but a cheeky little customer service girl who was more interested in taking selfies of her skirt coincidentally matching the carpet. I cleared my throat and said again:
- "Please, unfold your keyboard's feet."
Nothing. Coughed. Nothing. Finally, quite annoyed, I repeated myself for the 3rd time:
- "Unfold the feet, please!"
She jumped. Eyes wide. Noticed everyone staring. And very very slowly, with a look of complete puzzlement, she spread her legs.8 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
My manager is instructing my team to add a feature that can only be enabled for users by running an update script in the database.
When I argued that it's not really "complete" if it can't be turned on without someone going into the production database, I was told that not only is it complete, but they plan to have our non-technical customer service enable it for customers if the customer requests it...
Apparently giving everyone and their brother write access to prod is a good idea, but implementing a checkbox is a "waste of time and would cost too much money".
Probably going to float my resume... :-p2 -
fucking hosting company...
Just got a ticket back explaining that "the settings you want to make to your mysql database aren't possible with our hosting products". While they state in their FAQ that there are no restrictions applied. (We are talking about to possibility of using JOIN here!)
Ducking fuck.11 -
Apple at it again.
The new iPad mini suffers from "jelly scroll", and Apple tries to gaslight its customers into believing that this is normal.
No Apple, this is not normal. It's you. You and your shitty engineering, your shitty testing (too much secrecy, hence too few testers), your shitty marketing, and your shitty customer service. You are shitty as usual.
(Reference article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/... )7 -
FUCK YOU LENOVO AND FUCK YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE
They "repaired" the hinge and it locked solid three days after I got it back.
My faithful companion has been reduced to such a terrible state :(
I had to remove the screen, there was significant stress on the panel.
...I guess I could make a server or something out of it?11 -
Ok.. So I'm a student striving to be a mobile developer and since the job market is non-existent if you don't have a degree here I had to take a customer support job for the moment/until I find something better.
I was handling some purchases and ask this customer to provide me a screenshot of the receipt.
Send him steps on how to do it and a video demonstration for Android devices.
Now the great part
HE PROCEEDS TO SCAN HIS PHONE SCREEN WITH A SCANNER, PRINTS THE IMAGE AND THEN TAKES A PICTURE OF THE PRINTED FILE AND SENDS IT. HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I READ ANYTHING THERE YOU FUCKING TOMATO?!?!
HE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND HOW TO TO TAKE THE SCREENSHOT!!!5 -
"four million dollars"
TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.
That's all the management really cares about, apparently.
It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).
Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.
Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".
"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"
I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"
1st motherfucker.
Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?
Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.
Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.
This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.
I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!
Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.
Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?
Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.
Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.
Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.
I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.
Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.
Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).
In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.
Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.
4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.4 -
Full stack programmer on the recruitment post vs reality
Requirements written on the recruitment post: Frontend Development, Backend Development.
Reality: Frontend Development, Backend Development, Devopts, Infrastructure, UI/UX Design, Video Editing, Design, Customer Service...
Me: Full Stack means everything6 -
I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.
Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.
Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.
This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.
But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.
So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.
I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.
I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.21 -
On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"
"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.
Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!
How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.
The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.
Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.
In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.
Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.
If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.
I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.28 -
I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.
Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.
The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.
Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.
This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad. -
So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.
Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….
My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.
After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …
So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???
Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...
Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.
First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself16 -
I got 2 phone calls from AWS, asking me for feedback about a conference I've never attended. 🤦♂️
👍 For AWS customer service6 -
As the news that hackers have kept new "pirates of the Caribbean" on hold, this kind of comment reassures the trust or acts as reverse psychology to pay up.
Any ways they have got better customer service than any other big corporates1 -
And once again, Spotify just leaves me speechless.
I guess I don't actually need to talk about this clusterfuck of a mobile app getting more and more slow and unstable with every update. So let's talk about something else.
When I cracked the first limit, I thought it had to be a joke. 9.999 songs can be downloaded at once. But not all on one device. You can download 3.333 songs each to three separate devices - regardless of the fact that there is more than enough space left on the device and you are not even using any other device.
When I read this one [-> https://goo.gl/43YwKm ], I really got angry:
"If you move, or enter the wrong details, you need to create a new account (make sure you cancel the plan on your old account beforehand, and sign out everywhere) and subscribe to Premium for Family on that new account."
I don't even know how to respond to this except with insane wrath.
So now I cracked the next one. My library is full. The maximum number of songs that can be stored in the library is 10.000 and not one more.
If they wanted more money for the additional ressources, I'd even understand that. Yes, the suggestion calculations become more expensive, I do know that. And I would even pay for that. But there is no such option.
Instead, the company is making the most customer hostile decisions I could imagine.
Even though the competition proves that a multiple of such a limit is not a problem at all (Google Music: 50.000 songs / Apple Music: 100.000 songs).
And you have to create a new account when you move? That's hard to beat for impudence, especially wigh regard of the fact that no migration service is provided, so a person like me would spend a long time transferring all the stored music and playlists.
I'm not even sure it's complying with European law not to be able to see your address online, let alone change it.
And all of that because they know they can afford it anyway, since although the competition is a lot better on that score, they simply can't keep up in the matter of spectrum and algorithms.
And if I can only take 70% of my music with me when I change the service, I can just as well delete 3.000 songs from my library and stay with Spotify.
What a fucking wreck. I really don't get it.8 -
I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...
*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...1 -
I’ve had enough of shitty ISPs. Time to shame them 😈
Here in the UK, we have a company called TalkTalk who treat their customers as whores by not giving a shit and taking all their money.
I have had an ongoing issue for about 9 months now where our internet is more unstable, but also slower. We pay for 72Mbps at which we used to get, but now our internet tops out at 30Mbps if we are lucky. It can be 20Mbps one minute and 7Mbps the next, and I’ve had it drop below 1Mbps for no goddam reason.
I’ve spoken (well, argued) argued to their so called customer service department over phone and live chat explaining the situation and all they’ve done is said “restart your router”, or “we’ll send out a new router, it’s probably a WiFi issue”, or some bullshit like “I’ve ‘changed’ something on my end”. On one conversation with a so called technician, I had to explain how networking actually worded, and and even called a 7Mbps acceptable when we were paying for 10x that!!!!!
The thing that makes it worse is they actually have systems that detect any issues with customers internet lines, but they only alert the customer to the issue through an online portal, telling the customer to call up and get it dealt with rather than passing the info to a tech department and having issues fixed without the customer knowing unless it’s absolutely necessary.
So 9 months in and I still have a fluctuating, unstable internet connection which is slow and overpriced with no tunnel in sight. GIVE ME BACK MY GODDAMN MONEY YOU FUCKING THIEVING BASTARDS.3 -
So, it's time to fucking rant!
Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.
A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.
He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.
In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.
So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.
- a week later
The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/
He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"
This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."
The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.
After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.
In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.
- 2 Weeks later
This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"
This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...
1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.
So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.
- 2 weeks later
Customer leaves. Good riddance.
- sometime later
I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.
It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.
To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS
I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.2 -
This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.
I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.
First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).
The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.
And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...
And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).
Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.
- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."
But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.
-
* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.
** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.
*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.
**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA2 -
Last Sunday, we deployed 300 major application/service configuration changes, 60+ load balancer changes, DNS cutovers, changes to mission critical SQL servers, and informatica connection changes. This impacted every line of business, all customer facing apps, and all internal apps.
6 days from DEV to PROD, which includes all developer effort.
Deployment succesful!3 -
I just got the book "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition" from Amazon.
I've had my wars with Amazon in the past for not protecting packages properly, and now it happened again. For the third time in 6 months.
The cover of the book is damaged, pages are bend a bit and it looks like someone took a key and tried to draw something on the front cover.
I contacted customer support to get a replacement, which was no problem, but still fucking annoying that I have to spend time on this shit.
Anyway, what pisses me off is the amount of work I have to do in order to send this shit back to them. Holy fuck!
First of all, I haven't met a single competent employee at a "post office" here in Denmark, as all of the offices are now a part of a either hyper markets or grocery stores. This means, that it's the stores employees handling this.
In this process from Amazon I have to actually clear it for customs with a form they need to take care of.
I have to print 4 labels, 2 which I need to sign and 2 I need to do something else with...
But I'm so freaking scared that they'll fuck this up and I'll get billed for 2 books. It wouldn't fucking surprise me, considering how fucking shit our postal service is in Denmark and how I've been screwed over by Amazon in the past4 -
When you're at the till ordering a plain coffee and the barista SIGHS and ROLLS THEIR EYES at you. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? That's you're damn job, don't fucking do that. That's the only reason you're here!!!8
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I may have over delivered my service to this first customer i got.
It doesn't help that pricing was dirt cheap and i over promised in a bid to make it attractive.
But in my hurry to please the client, I've been feeling so much stress since last 24 hrs. Dealing with customers suck. I hate this.
They can be little dumb and doesn't think much before blaming you if something's not working as expected.
I hate this feeling and now i remember why my initial business model was designed such that I wouldn't have to deal with clients.
But somewhere along the way, i forgot about that. :/
I wish I could get rid of this customer.3 -
So I decided to positively tackle the negative energy surrounding me these past few days. I tried to be productive. I went overboard, of course. Where is the fun in normal?
I wrote down all the urgent tasks I must die-die finish. Anyone closed with Asians will know the severity of the die-die and must combo. I started with tasks I have to finish in 3 days. Then in a week. Then in 2 weeks. I ended up creating more than 25 cards across my respective Trello boards.
The tasks that come to me always need minimum 3,4 working hours. Literally. The furthest deadline I see is Oct 15. The tasks I counted is more than 25. No appointments nor meetings were counted yet. It is not impossible. If I finish 2 tasks per day, 14 days is enough to complete all. I might have to continuously work 2 whole weeks of course. But it is still fine, right? Right, guys? Right? It's doable. Right?
I won't get any unskippable appointment within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't get new tasks to finish within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to guide other people how to do their tasks within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to work other people's tasks when they absent within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to entertain any annoying client because customer service team can't deal within this 2 weeks. Right?
I won't have to do other personal tasks within this 2 weeks. Right? (Like helping with creating a wedding slideshow for a friend marrying on Oct 28)
My life is totally fine. Right?3 -
Today I wanted to activate the gzip compression on the site of a customer before delivery.
Unfortunately the hosting service (the most popular in France) did not activate this module on its servers. Why in 2016, this module is not enabled by default !15 -
I've worked in a lot of customer service jobs and the more i have to deal with client, the more story starting to pile up. But something always come back and it's frustrating. The entitlement people have. I work as a Technical Support agent and for the most part i'm actually happy to help people with fixing their problems. But once in a while i always get that idiot that doesn't do anything i told him, blame me because "my fixes" don't work or just straight up don't listen to me and think they know better. Why the fuck do you call me if you need help if you're going to ignore everything i say and act like a fucking children. I'm not the one that call for technical support.
I know this place is more for Dev, but i'm sure those kind of things happen all the time when a client think he know more than the dev themselves...1 -
Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.
My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).
Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.
And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...
And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."
Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...3 -
To provide excellent customer service and provide extra services, we collect your personal information.
Bullshit. You're not using my personal information for customer service, otherwise your call center wouldn't suck so badly.3 -
This would be my first official post.
Been a IT Technician for a managed service provider for the past 9 years up until last year August. Managing director pulls me in with a movement to App Development after coming across some personal hobby projects I have done in the past.
Started in the new position in November as Junior Developer and workloads get dumped on me and left to figure it out. 4 weeks of running through code without documentation and the solutions started to make sense.
Started a new solution for a Large remote customer with documentation and timelines in December and I get pulled in again for a second time in front of the MD.
Good News:With effect in January I have been promoted to Head of Application development.
Bad News: The existing department head is leaving end of the month and I am to go 900km from home to hand over all responsibilities for the next 3 weeks.
Better News: Department has started shifting to DevOps and it is up to me to set the policies and work flows to how I see fit.
Worse news: it starts by expanding the team asap as 10 projects accounting to 4000 man hours with deadlines in Q3.
Wish me luck. It's going to be twisted Rollercoaster ride...4 -
!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.
potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.
their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.
they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.
as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).
i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.
i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.
Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.
4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.
Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.
i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P3 -
Had to ring the UK tax office, have to pay a sizeable amount by 31st Jan, but I have spent any savings on essential living based shit. I was dreading the call, but best to do it before 31st or you get an instant £100 fine. Well I was totally shocked to find a really lovely lady on the other end, she was most helpful and not like the cunt I got a few years back. It just goes to show that two people doing the same job with the same procedures and outcomes, 1 can be a complete cunt and the other kind and compassionate. Moral, there’s no need to be a cunt.
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What a day! yesterday i submited a new version of our mobile app and the shit began.
The app was validated during the night (AppStore), when i wake up this morning my inbox was full! Basically every users who updated the app was stuck i tried to figure out whats going on. After few hours our customer service called me to help one of our client who was very angry, the funniest part is that the client recognize me... i was his teacher few years ago...
Guys i feel raped... really9 -
PayPal = GayPal
PHASE 1
1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card
PAHSE 2
7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done
8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money
9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill
10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it
PHASE 3
11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY
12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal
13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:
"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.
As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."
PHASE 4
14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:
"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk
You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out
Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.
Do you understand?"
15. They reply:
"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."
16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?
HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?12 -
When a customer question gets escalated all the way to the dev team when it could have easily been solved if those escalating the issue had bothered to use the site themselves
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so... 9 years ago we had this super awesome codebase. 1 file, complete logic COPIED to be used in ui and service/daemon. I scrolled to the middle of the file and there was no source. it was out of bounds of my monitor to the right because of nested ifs. ok... what the fuck!! the worst part: I had to implement a new FEATURE into this mess. 2 days. I said it would not work as expected because the feature was not thought through. but project said let's gooooo! ok there I was, a junior with an impossible to implement feature and a codebase from hell. I've implemented something, all night long. next day it was the problem of the consultants. they called me, I told them why it's impossible that this would ever work, they understood and talked to the customer. he accepted the solution. WTF?! anyway, in those days I thought about quitting developing software as my daily job....4
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This is irritating. Fuck you stitchfix. If I were convicted of a felony and did time, my odds of finding a job are basically zero. But for some reason (I can only surmise weaponized wokeness, or has an executives sex tape) they want to keep this fuck on who maliciously deletes half of Cisco's AWS service infra, pleads guilty and is looking at 5 years and $250k in fines.
https://theregister.com/2020/08/...
This isn't even the first time their sourcing of resources has become a problem. Deloitte nailed them just last year with an audit that said their outsourcing had led to effectively no way for them to control their financials or secure customer data. And their response is apparently, double down.
https://wsj.com/amp/articles/...
Fucking MBA fucks.1 -
Customer Service: “I apologize for the delay in entering your warranty info. My system is a bit slow.”
Me: “That’s ok.”
Also me: *What is this, 1986?! Upgrade from DOS already!!*2 -
When someone hiring you for an internship harasses you to maintain your code after the contract's duration...
Just stop treating me like a customer service and get on with your project man4 -
I always get a kick out of it when I get to read a hilarious email that was sent in to customer service about our product where the customer is so pissed that they curse everyone out and then they call out the programmers too. "You should fire all your programmers too, they suuckk!!!"1
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In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:
If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3 -
You know what a payment feature that is “so secure even the correct user can’t use it” is called?
FUCKING BROKEN. Jesus Christ I hate it when “customer service” people are trying to sound smart.1 -
Holy retarded internet company. The fiber cable that comes from the power pole lost its connection to the building I live in. So the fiber was laying on the ground in the parking lot. The upside is it is still working. The problem is people are going to run over the fiber and break it. So I sent an email to the ISP on Thursday. They didn't create a ticket all day on Friday. By the time I got home they were not open. I called their tech support number and pressed 0 until I got a real person. I explained they need to fix this soon or it will get broken. They said "I understand" and then proceeded to create a ticket for fucking wednesday next week! I told them it will damaged by then. They said "I understand". Then I get a text saying they will do this wednesday. No you stupid fuckers, you do not understand!
Queue the McGuiver music:
I got out some steel wire I use to fix stupid shit like this. I made a hook to connect the steel cable holding the fiber. This hook will go around some exposed electrical conduit. Then I got a board to lift it up high (no ladder and 5 inches thick of ice on ground). I cannot balance wire hook on board and get it to slip down. So I got a steel pole I have and attached another hook with electrical tape. As I passed the hook over the conduit I used other pole to grab bottom of hook and pull it down to keep a hold of the conduit. Now the fiber is up in the air again above the parking lot. I hope this stupid hack works until wednesday. My right arm hurts like hell cause the strain of holding the fiber taut while I pulled the hook down. It strained my right hand.
Worst customer service on the planet with Century Stink. They fucking make it harder than hell to get help and it seems they take almost a week to fix shit.4 -
Following situation:
6 people sitting on a table having a few beers Friday evening.
3 Devs and 3 non-Dev people. The devs were talking about stories and problems with customer service...
So far so good... Suddenly one dev came up and said:
Hey guys! I have a very funny and interesting "GoDaddy" story to tell!
The faces of the non dev people were priceless because they imagined a totally different story.....4 -
I've been a Macbook user for over a decade, after the initial disappointment of the 2016 MacBook Pro release I decided to move to a PC, against my better judgement I decided to buy a new Dell XPS 15, after reading all the reviews praising it's build quality and performance + it seems to have good hardware for Linux compatibility.
Soo much regret, I couldn't be more disappointed, it's such a piece of shit, I admit I probably got a bad egg, but dealing with Dell support is like pulling hairs from my testicle sack. If I have to pay an extra $500-$1000 on my next laptop for an "Apple Tax" to get a product that has been through proper quality control and has awsome customer service so be it, last time I try something new.
BTW I'm not a PC hater, I just wish more companies made high quality products.10 -
Have you ever had the moment when you were left speechless because a software system was so fucked up and you just sat there and didn't know how to grasp it? I've seen some pretty bad code, products and services but yesterday I got to the next level.
A little background: I live in Europe and we have GDPR so we are required by law to protect our customer data. We need quite a bit to fulfill our services and it is stored in our ERP system which is developed by another company.
My job is to develop services that interact with that system and they provided me with a REST service to achieve that. Since I know how sensitive that data is, I took extra good care of how I processed the data, stored secrets and so on.
Yesterday, when I was developing a new feature, my first WTF moment happened: I was able to see the passwords of every user - in CLEAR TEXT!!
I sat there and was just shocked: We trust you with our most valuable data and you can't even hash our fuckn passwords?
But that was not the end: After I grabbed a coffee and digested what I just saw, I continued to think: OK, I'm logged in with my user and I have pretty massive rights to the system. Since I now knew all the passwords of my colleagues, I could just try it with a different account and see if that works out too.
I found a nice user "test" (guess the password), logged on to the service and tried the same query again. With the same result. You can guess how mad I was - I immediately changed my password to a pretty hard.
And it didn't even end there because obviously user "test" also had full write access to the system and was probably very happy when I made him admin before deleting him on his own credentials.
It never happened to me - I just sat there and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, I even had a small existential crisis because why the fuck do I put any effort in it when the people who are supposed to put a lot of effort in it don't give a shit?
It took them half a day to fix the security issues but now I have 0 trust in the company and the people working for it.
So why - if it only takes you half a day to do the job you are supposed (and requires by law) to do - would you just not do it? Because I was already mildly annoyed of your 2+ months delay at the initial setup (and had to break my own promises to my boss)?
By sharing this story, I want to encourage everyone to have a little thought on the consequences that bad software can have on your company, your customers and your fellow devs who have to use your services.
I'm not a security guy but I guess every developer should have a basic understanding of security, especially in a GDPR area.2 -
The absolutely terrible and anti-customer "service" provided by Comcast should be illegal.
My bill went up $25 this month without any warning whatsoever, and all I get is their braindead AI they are training with customer voice data. So I shout jibberish into it until it connects me to a human.
I have actual choices where I live, so I'm going to cancel. -
i feel like everything around me is catching fire, so I'm trying to put it out while also keeping a customer service smile and dealing with people5
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This post is kinda late. For those who haven't read my previous rants, a marketing coworker bragged about a feature that we hadn't yet finished. (I'm thinking that they perhaps did it to put extra pressure on the dev team 🤔.) Of course it backfired pretty bad, because this feature was a plug-in for another service, and even though the dev team was on time with the feature, the other service we were writing a plug-in for took _sooo_ long to approve of our code, and it made this marketing guy look so bad in front of these clients because the feature was a few weeks late.
A part of the new feature was that some of their data would be synced with this service. These customers were so important that we couldn't afford to disappoint them, and the solution was... *drumroll please* ... that this marketing guy would have to manually copy the customer's data from the service into our platform to make the customer think this feature is ready. Row by row. I'm hearing it takes about one hour of their day 🤣
I mean I'm good friends with the guy but... they kinda deserved it2 -
A follow up about Mozilla IRL spotify radio.
Very interesting talk relates to internet and privacy in gerenal. (Not about programming btw)
Eg: Bose headphone app sends your data to data broker,
which ransomware rated with top customer service,
how to setup a bait for catching Twitter bots
It feels like Mozilla is fighting for justice.
I'm totally sold.3 -
I have heard that StarTech's customer service is on point... But this is something refreshing and a very surprising beginning of my birthday!1
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Fucking telecom and their shady ways of providing "service". Don't even need to consider paying for porn sites when my isp comes along with its own, overpriced service to fuck a customer in every way possible.
Probably other providers as well, but for now I'm fucking pissed at them because they already scammed my grandmother twice, when it comes to internet speed, probably because they thought she wouldn't notice either way.
My grandmother's residence can receive up too 200mbps, so she got a plan according to that. Installation of the router was included as a one time fee.
This is where they first scammed her, imo. They installed a router, that can route 100mbps at max. At first I though she got a plan for that speed.
An elder telecom technician, who was investing a completely irrelevant issue, switched it out for one than can handle uo to 1tbps. He had no obligation to do so and he didn't charge anything.
Seriously, probs to that one guy. He openly stated that telecoms pulls off this scam and switched it for free, since they have many of routers lying around anyways (I wonder why 🤔🤔🤔)
Anyways, guy switched out the router and BAMM! from ~80mbps to ~170, iirc.
Fast forward a couple of months I notice internet speed is capped out at 76mpbs. Capped out way to perfectly, to just blame the cable. But obviously the guys over at customer support do exactly that.
Calls telecom: "yeah, your contact only goes up to 100, 76 because of the cable. You need to pay extra to get up to 176".
Excuse me, what the fuck did you just say, shit nugget? We should pay extra for something you contest from us?
Yo, Mister ChromosomOverflow, don't think that relaying the responsibility to another number to call will put you out of the fucking shit you tried to pull off.
Edit: The contract states up to 1000, 200 or 100mpbs download depending on what the cables allow and in case of 200 there's 100mbps upload, but we also get capped out there at 20. I wish these fucker one gang rape per non-received mpbs2 -
Last month my phone (YU YUPHORIA) stopped booting up.. so I went the "customer service center" and asked the guy maybe he can install new software. He tried and said we can't repair it.
I love this phone not the best performance phone but I love it. So I don't want to throw it away. So yesterday night I started searching how to install custom ROMs. and found a development mode build for my device. After some tutorials and experiment it's up and running baby... 📱😍. Thank you internet for helping me..1 -
Just got off the phone with a csr about a bug they found. No biggie, I said I'd fix it. Basically until it gets fixed I told them that when they do their process to make sure to do "foo" first, then "bar" second. As soon as I got off the phone, had to poop so I went to the bathroom, and as soon as I sat down I get a message from the same CSR, "Hey I did bar first, can I type foo then bar again?"
WTF DID I JUST SAY LITERALLY 2 MINUTES AGO ON THE PHONE. TBH IT WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU JUST DIDNT DO ANYTHING FOR 15 MINUTES BUT NOW I HAVE TO COMB CLOUD FUNCTION LOGS, FIND THE DOC UID YOU CREATED, FIND THE DOC YOU MADE, DELETE IT, DELETE THE ASSIGNMENT IN YOUR TRASH ASS WORKPLACE PORTAL, AND STILL FIX THE SAID BUG3 -
Get CC'd from one person to another is the equivalent of getting transferred whenever talking to customer service.1
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I just watched https://youtube.com/watch/... - towards the (very) end he's talking about how software developers rule the world... and I just realized something.
A while back, I was working on an accounting sub system for a SaaS product. We managed some of the revenue of our customers and had the accounting for that part as well. Revenue + Payments (with all the VAT / sales tax / ... that you need to have). BUT no expenses.
One day, the head accountant of a customer, angrily demanded that we immediately implement a new payment method, called commission.
You don't need to be an accounting expert for knowing, that a commission is an expense you have because somebody else marketed / sold your product / service for you. Making it a payment method is probably wrong. With a bit more knowledge you'd know that the taxes which are around expenses are completely different to revenue or payments. (btw payments didn't even have any taxes in those countries that we covered at that time at least).
So there I was standing, a software developer, trying to explain the product manager and the head accountant of our customer, that the idea is beyond stupid, and the fact that it comes from an accountant is super scary to me. (he was usually extremely picky about everything we did.)
Luckily, it was easy to convince the manager. He tried to explain it to the accountant but that person just didn't get it.
as if designing resilient distributed systems, which have 99,99% up time weren't hard enough, we also need to be experts in every domain that we have to deal with? And if there is a tiny bug and one out of 10s of thousands of transactions is screwed up, people start panicking and "loose trust in the product"? - what the hell is wrong with them?
Luckily it's a minority of customers only, but each of them is such a pain. Do you also have customers like that? who should know better, but somehow you are the expert in their domain?2 -
The $customer gets a device from us, with th wifi connected as specified in the order. $customer connects it to the mains and monitor, puts in the dongle and the connection is established.
Fast forward 3 weeks, now everything went south. The device does not connect to the network, the service is offline. Our first question: "Has someone modified the WiFi name or password?"
$customer: "No, there were no changes in the WiFi"
So the full arsenal of debugging the connection over LAN starts, interrupted by $customer unplugging the device "because he needs LAN now"
After sometime, we figured out, everything is fine with the device, and ask $customer once again, if the config $ssid and $password is correct.
$customer: "Oh, we changed the name to $ssid2 because it looks nicer, is that a problem?"
Internal: "Are you f*kin kidding me? I asked you exactly that"
Me: "Alright, that explains the issues. Please tell us in advance if you want to change something with the WiFi." -
God I hate when dev work gets all political.
Our team had a technical meeting with a difficult partner/customer, that wants to connect to our internal service, so we are writing an Integration Service for this.
Apparently the project is very important on both sides and highly political so in the meeting there was a member of the Board of directors of them. We just wanted to check one feature to verify they can connect, etc.
After some minor bugs showed up, that guy goes on ranting about how this is all a joke ("Verarschung" literally) and how we did not deliver all features yet as promised (Note : that was not promised) and basically indirectly personally attacked us, our company and our team.
It's incredible how such assholes can stay in such positions.5 -
I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.
But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.
And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.
People treat me like the adult that I am.
I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.
I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen. -
I was tasked to evaluate wherever a customer could use an implementation of OTRS ( https://otrs.com/ )
Is it just me or is there no information on this site apart from <OTRS> will make your life better! <OTRS> will cure AIDS! <OTRS> will end world hunger!
This site is trying to use its fucking product name in every god damn sentence. <OTRS>. Everytime <OTRS> is mentioned it is fucking bold printed! My eyes are bleeding within 2 minutes of visiting this site.
I can't get any information about what excatly it is apart from their catchphrase: OTRS (again, bold. I'll refrain from putting it in <> from now, i think you got the point) is a customizable support desk software that manages workflows and structures communication so there are no limits to what your service team can achieve.
So, it's a support desk software you can customize. Great. What does it do?
"Whether you deal with thousands of inquiries and incidents daily [...] you’ll need digital structures that integrate standardized processes
and make communication transparent between teams and departments,
as well as for external customers."
Great, but what does it do?
"Reduce costs and improve satisfaction by structuring customer service communication with OTRS."
Great, BUT WHAT DOES IT DO?
"Manage incidents simply and uncover the data needed to make forward-thinking strategy decisions. OTRS is an ITSM solution that scales and adapts to your changing business needs."
W H A T D O E S I T D O ?!
Okay fuck that, maybe the product page has something to say.
Hm... A link on the bottom of the page says it is a feature list ( https://otrs.com/product-otrs/... )
Ah great, so i got a rough idea about what it is. Our customer wants a blackboard solution with a window you can pin to your desktop and also has a basic level of access control.
So it seems to be way to overloaded on features to recommend it to them. Well, let's see if can at least do everything they want. So i need screenshots of the application. Does the site show any of them? I dare you to find out.
Spoiler: It does not. FFS. The only pictures they show you are fucking mock ups and the rest is stock photos.
Alright, onwards to Google Images then.
Ah, so it's a ticket system then. Great, the site did not really communicate that at all.
Awesome, that's not what i wanted at all. That's not even what the customer wanted at all! Who fucking thought that OTRS was a good idea for them!
Fuck!5 -
ChaseBank is getting up my nose. Twice in four business days my account was flagged and I had to change my password for 'security' purposes. I spent the better part of 90 minutes in a futile attempt to find out why, when there's been no suspicious activity on my account, I'm being flagged. My father contacted a branch manager near him who told him to dial the priolrity customer service number and key in the letters (I shit you not) HO HO. I called the number. It's the same damn number I'd been calling. I called the branch. They told me I'd definitely receive a call back last Friday by 1800. No call. So, yesterday I called the manager of that branch, verified its location, told the manager he was supposed to call me by 1800 last Friday, and Chase Corporate would be in touch with him soon to explain that when you tell a customer you'll call them, you'll fucking call them.2
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When your company expects you to manually change information in the production db by saying "hey, client Billy wants his stuff moved back to where it was"3
-
Customer service didn't want to refund a $40 late fee because their stupid website wouldn't accept payment and kept locking me out.
So I did $40 worth of talking to one of their supervisors.
Yep. I fillibustered customer service. -
soo after finishing 1 year of my 2 yr CS program, i moved back to my hometown so my partner wouldn't have to keep commuting for her career. couldnt get a cs job here with no experience and only 1 yr of school and like basically no portfolio to show for myself, i took a customer service job in a tech company with a lot of support for career pathing.
end goals are to end up working for their software dev team, mid goal is to switch into their web dev team from customer service since the career pathing is WAY easier from customer service to web dev, then web dev to sw dev rather than customer service straight to sw dev
so in the meantime i need to be practicing and building my portfolio but FUCK i have NO motivation and with coronavirus fucking up my life and everybody elses all i wanna do at the end of the workday and on weekends is melt into my bed in a semi-comatose state
i woke up early today to get some work done on my portfolio but all im doing is watching grey's anatomy and playing mobile games
i used to feel so motivated and excited to code but the excitement is gone and now even doing stuff for myself is a lot more like work than play
just need to rant it out rn4 -
Customer service my ass. I wouldn't even call it service. All you could do is check if it's working now. Of course it's working... I've just told you it's fucking working 2 minutes then inaccessible for fucking 10.
And when I tell you that your service had began to loose quality in the past few months you just sit there in FUCKING SILENCE. MOTHERFUCKER JUST TELL ME THAT YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT... OR SORRY... OR GO FUCK YOURSELF, NOT MY JOB... I DON'T FUCKING CARE JUST DON'T SIT THERE IN SILENCE UNTIL I HAVE ENOUGH AND HANG UP... I WASN'T EVEN SHOUTED TO HIM. I was disappointed but not angry... Not until you decided to just ignore me, fucktard...
Needless to say just when I hung up it stopped working again. -.-4 -
Working for one of our oldest customer, in some serious old, ugly and outdated code(web service).
The dev db doesn't contain any relevant data.
The QA service points to production, so can't use it for any tests.
My contact, at the customer, is going on vacation tomorrow.
Their pm is going on vacation next Friday.
No time for refactoring, db data updates or otherwise do important and much needed updates.
They want it to be done yesterday.
FML. -
I remember someday from a few years ago, because i just got off the phone with a customer calling me way too early! (meaning i still was in my pyjamas)
C:"Hey NNP, why si that software not available (He refers to fail2ban on his server)
Me: "It's there" (shows him terminal output)
C: " But i cannot invoke it, there is no fail2ban command! you're lieing"
Me: "well, try that sudoers command i gave you (basically it just tails all the possible log files in /var/log ) , do you see that last part with fail2ban on it?
C: "Yeah, but there is only a file descriptor! nothing is showing! It doesnt do anything.
Me: "That's actually good, it means that fail2ban does not detect any anomalies so it does not need to log it"
C:" How can you be sure!?"
Me: "Shut up and trust me, i am ROOT"
(Fail2ban is a software service that checks log files like your webserver or SSH to detect floods or brute force attempts, you set it up by defining some "jails" that monitor the things you wish to watch out for. A sane SSH jail is to listen to incoming connection attempts and after 5 or 10 attempts you block that user's IP address on firewall level. It uses IPtables. Can be used for several other web services like webservers to detect and act upon flooding attempts. It uses the logfiles of those services to analyze them and to take the appropriate action. One those jails are defined and the service is up, you should see as little log as possible for fail2ban.)5 -
Customer: You say you connect to XYZ service, but my data is not getting synced!
*checks their account*
Me: I see you have not integrated your two accounts. Go to Settings > Integrations > Connect to XYZ.
C: Why? But you already connect XYZ! You should already know all of my data!3 -
I really really want to change jobs and pursue being a game dev.
I am so tired of our company kissing our clients' asses, out of fear they might leave, making the developer work an extra mile without the appropriate salary for the extra work, which now I realize why we have alot of sh*ty projects.
I think there is a clear line between customer service and being suckups.
:(4 -
It was the last year of high school.
We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).
Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)
The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)
Part 1/2:
Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.
I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.
No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.
48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.
Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).
I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.
Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.
Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.
NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)
The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.
So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.
Part 2/2:
The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.
My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:
Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456
Me: … that won't work, got a real email?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: I implemented an email verification system.
Him: … ok … just show me the website.
Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…
Him: Good job.
He stood up and moved on.
YOU MOTHERFUCKER.
I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.
AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT
I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.2 -
We were forced to work from home since our region is under "Enhanced Community Quarantine". I brought my work computer at home so I don't need to set up shit on my personal computer. After 2 days, I lost my internet connection and I can't contact my fucking ISP, their office is closed and their customer service doesn't exist. I am now under No Work No Pay policy. Fucking what the fuck.1
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Scrum is such bullshit. You are made to report to idiot product owners who were promoted from customer service reps.(that is who they were in my previous job). A few years answering phones and all of a sudden programmers are made to report to them who don't know jack about coding...Made to work in high pressure projects by setting 2 week deadlines. Then when there are bugs in code, you are penalized for bad code.5
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I've been in a fucking chat with a Verizon customer service rep for 45 fucking minutes....
Talking about everything under the moon to help the man out from having to do legitimate work. We've talked about phone preference, what phone's we have, what we want, favorite features, ect.
It's fucking hilarious and I'm genuinely entertained right now.
Glad to know I'm helping someone out.
Edit: I was honestly sad when I had to end it so I could eat before my food got ice cold lol3 -
If your customer service is so bad that people talk about trying to use the occult to get in touch with you, your company is shit.
Dev related cause I only want to talk to the customer service because the api docs are that fucking bad. -
FUCK CUSTOMER SUPPORT
I live next to a province road so for things like internet more parties are involved then on a usual neighborhood street. 5 years ago I was asking about fibre internet since every household in a 8km area from my house has a fiber connect (except those next to a province road). They told me to contact them if a road construction would happen so they could do it simultaneously.
Today I thought lets contact them again since a complete road overhaul is gonna take place in the coming 6 months. They said that I've to contact them before those plans are made public otherwise they cannot jump in and do their work as well.
How would I inform a company of plans that are not public so I don't know about?1 -
So today i had to visit this banks site to do updation on a document but for some reason the modal dialogue that was supposed to open was not working and i couldn't continue to next step.
On an attempt to contact customer support, i browsed the site for relevant details. As i do that, i observed this site is so shitty that it can't even properly render on Google Chrome! It was an horrific experience finding info in that site.
Finally found the customer support form and as I clicked the "submit" it didn't give any feedback whether it was processing or not. After like over a minute of uncertainty, it got redirected to a 404 page.
Frustrated, I went on to their twitter and I almost tweeted calling out their terrible web developer team.
But, my instinct told me to calm my titties and i tweeted a regular confused user tweet.
Got their attention and few hrs later i got a phone call from someone working there. He didn't sound like a customer service representative from the way he spoke. He told it was an issue with their website and had fixed it. I tried again as he was on the line but it was not working for me. And then i shared screenshot of the issue. He tested it again and said it was working for them. Still not working for me. ( Probably cache issue on my end ). Thought he would suggest to clear cache and try. But he asked me to try on another computer since it was working for him.
As i searched for a another system, i got a call from customer support guy and he said he will do the update on their end and told me to tell details. Since the info was not that sensitive in nature, I went with it.
Pretty sure the other guy i talked to was a developer.
This made me think - had i tweeted out a mean tweet calling out their shitty website it would have been probably awkward talking to him - I'd have to be mean again. It could've ruined his day, maybe he was under pressure from his pm that he had to make the phone call. He probably hates his job already managing that shitty legacy code..
I don't know - either way, I'm glad i was able to keep myself calm and not be a source of negative energy. -
I created an ASP.Net Web Application as my personal Web site. Tested it locally then wanted to test it in a live environment. I purchased a domain/hosting package then publish via FTP. Point it to homepage and nothing shows up. I call customer service and they say it's hosted on a Linux server but their options don't show that it is Linux based. So I had to change it to a Windows platform that it should have already been on. SMH 😣
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Never “try” to optimise just a bit more just for your own sake if the customer doesn’t ask you too. The next day you may be working on getting the service up and stable again on your holiday day :-(2
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😤
When you make a simple call to customer service but you end up rambling to the poor rep on the other end for nearly an hour...
By the end couldn't tell if she wanted to laugh, cry, or just drink a pint of bleach. -
Tldr: no router, almost not work.
Ok I recently moved into a new house, and I signed a contract for an Internet line.
Problem is that the router has been sent at the ISP shop, where I was supposed to get it personally. But guess what? Covid emergency happened two days after, and the shop closed.
So, after spending two days calling customer service of both ISP and Postal office without being able to speak to anybody, I received a Sms saying that the pack was not delivered because the receiver was closed.
After some more unsuccessful calls to the same two entities I managed to find the actual shop's phone number, that was actually thw owner's house (he's working from home). I spoke to him, told the problem, and he changed the router destination to my house.
Today I checked the package status on the postal website and I saw that it seems that they tried every day, at 7:02 am, to deliver the bloody package again at the shop! I truly hope this was a bug on their tracking system. It's weird that the hours were always 7:02am, because the package delivery office opens at 8:30 am, so again I'm praying any existent and non-existent god that that's just a bug. I'm kinda tired of being stuck with my phone hotspot with limited GB and with ISP public routers with about 5Mbps.
I wish I had @netikras skills with router building.4 -
I got into development only a short time ago.
My mother paired up with a partner who was a dev making some serious cheddar when I was just barely not a teenager anymore, while I was working shitty low-wage customer service gigs.
Honestly, the only reason either of them could give me for doing it was the money.
A couple years went by, I was extremely fortunate: found a job within 6 weeks of finishing a year-long program at the local technical college which only yielded me a basic cert. By that time, my mother's partner had long lost their job, and I had paid their rent (twice my own) on two separate occasions. I went from usually having about a hundred dollars after bills to last me until next paycheck to five times that.
A couple more years go by, I'm doing pretty well supporting my own family now (my wife and child, not anyone else) and somehow doing way better now than the people who spurred me ever did. I no longer have a reason to compulsively check my bank account out of worry that I'm overdrawn.
Now I'm locked in an endless battle in my mind to find a correction for every flaw in my life, or at the very least a workaround. I go to bed and wake up thinking about the same things: my work. Buuuutttt.... My family has everything they could ever need and more.
So I guess I could say the support I got from my family was:
* an initial nudge in the "right" direction
* a reality check on what the industry can be like
* a sentence to eternal damnation by changing my paradigm on everything -
Fucking job recruiters or whoever the fuck.
If the first line on my resume is under "Objective" and it states, "To obtain a job, internship, or Co-op in the field of Networking, Cybersecurity, or Administration." You can clearly see the world sales and customer service are not in there.
If you take 5 seconds to read that or search for the words customer service or sales YOU WON'T FUCKING FIND ANYTHING.
SO WHY THE FLYING FUCK DO YOU CUMBUCKET FILLED PIECES OF SHIT KEEP OFFERING SALES AND CUSTOMER JOBS TO ME.
I even got a senior sales position before. :|
Yet I can't even get a call back from an internship that's related to what I want to do lol. Smh.1 -
Due to a service window, we were requested by customer to set up a separate instance of the same web application so they could keep working.
The separate instance was set up and all parties were informed.
Customer and project manager complain that people are still using the old instance, to which I replied I sent an email informing which instance should be used.
Their response: "You wrote to use the new instance, but you didn't write NOT to use the old one."1 -
So, I produce a monthly report for our customer service department each month, and this report includes various statistics related to our company's support performance. Two of the included statistics are the "Average Speed of Answer" (ASA for short) and the "Abandoned Call percentage" (ABD % for short) that are derived from client calls to support.
The formulae for these values are:
- ASA = time in seconds all calls that were answered spent waiting to be answered divided by the number of answered calls - displayed as hh:mm:ss
- ABD % = number of abandoned calls minus those that were abandoned in under 10 seconds (referred to as "short abandoned") divided by the sum of total calls that were offered minus the sum of short abandons & transfers
These statistics are also included in a daily version of the same report that all Customer Service leadership personnel have access to.
Now, every single fucking month the same Sr. Manager always has some kind of "discrepancy" with the monthly report that ALWAYS boils down to his dumbass trying to average shit on the daily Excel reports for that month and it being different than what the monthly report is showing. Now, these reports ONLY display the calculated value for any calculated fields mind you - not the raw values of the DB fields used in said calculations.
This month I have to tell this shit-for-brains that you can't just take an average of ASA & ABD % from the Daily's and compare them to the Monthly numbers because their calculated fucking fields!!!
Come to think of it, this has been his issue for like the past 5 months, and I seriously can't fix stupid!
Sometimes I just wanna reply to his snarky ass, corporate bullshit emails like, "BRUH!, The only motherfucking discrepancy I can locate is your IQ and your fucking title - that shit don't correlate homie! Need to take that ass back to High School statistics or something!"
But I digress...
TL;DR
I have to deal with a Sr. Manager who doesn't fucking realize you can't average a calculated field from a daily report and think it's gonna match up with the monthly report. I believe he is borderline retarded, and I often wonder how he got the "Sr." In his title let alone "Manager".
Oh wait, this is corporate America - you just gotta kiss the most ass... never mind.4 -
So, we are having a SaaS service for people where they can build X stuff. It is all fine as long as you are using basic things there, no complex cases and so on. Even on some complex - it does work just fine.
Here's the rant itself:
The production server throws us errors every 5-10 minutes that something broke and fails to do job X. At first we were all hands on deck fixing it ASAP to make it stable to later realise that most of these cases were users doing stupid shit. Then we began to fix the core issues rather than chasing every single issue there is (costs are important you know) - funny enough, we get few support requests a week and our 1h response time + 24h fix time usually buys us that customer and allows t o leave a great impression.
So all in all, bugles production is good but great support - is way better. Users can deal with issues especially if they are experimenting there but when they need answers - you'd better give it to them.1 -
Customer: I literally don't want to do anything make it work.
Support: here is a good video tutorial to get you started
Customer: I don't want to invest anytime in getting anything to work, just make it work.
Arrrrrggggg just use another service2 -
I am partially self taught and partially book taught.
The self taught part involved viewing the source of websites and learning HTML that way.
The book part comes from when I worked at a .COM startup in their customer service dept while learning HTML. I mentioned it to the IT Director and he threw a ColdFusion book at me and told me to learn it and I could move to the IT dept. Needless to say, I haven't done customer service work since.3 -
I'm only a humble customer service representative in Amazon, I really hate the email editor we use to mail the clients after they call or chat with us. This, of course, means I need to include Emacs on my workflow so I can suffer less, let's Elisp the heck out of this problem!2
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I really like programming but after 5 years I realized it's a very social job. We have to deal with others more than the marketing people or heck even some customer service people.3
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So.
I just sat here and listened to some awful gibberish that sounded kind of like the language a person would use to describe logistics or construction, but that still lacked so much filler language that a straight spew of jargon doesn't seem likely.
reminds me of every single time I hear someone describe new technology that ends up bombing.
like the push towards graph databases which I personally can't understand the underlying storage mechanism which would make them work
of someone describing locks to your house that can be unlocked from a cellphoen over the internet.
or 2 form factor authentication and what happens if you lose your phone and there is no customer service ?
on that last maybe they could take a sample of every customers voice every year or a fingerprint or a blood sample :P1 -
Oh the joys of working with an Enterprise customer.
Background:
Discussion about service architecture with me, development architect (ArchDev) and integration architect (ArchInt). The topic arises of needing to access int. segment systems for a public facing cloud application.
Me: so we'll just need a s2s vpn and then we can just create a route and call the services normally.
ArchDev: sounds good to me, it will take a few months to get that set up
ArchInt: we done need that, we can just use the gateway and then route all the requests through the ESB.
Me: 😕 do you mean the service gateway?
ArchInt: (drops bomb) no, we decide that all API should be implement in ESB, so ESB will handle traffic
Me: *pauses, steps up to the whiteboard, does latency math* setting aside the fact that isn't how ESB's work, that will add at least 700ms latency to each request.
ArchInt: well that is fine for enterprise, things not usually as fast in enterprise you must expect slowdown to be safe
ArchDev: *starts updating resume on the ladders
Me: 💀🔫 -
Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
Bad English aside I am so sick of incompetent customer service reps. Holy shit it's like they will hire anyone these days.
Here just read from this script and not the code version. That's all the tech you need to know right here on this single piece of paper.
Fucking incompetent bastards need to go work at a non technical job like Burger King because tech support is beyond them.
They'd probably fuck that up to. That's a completely different rant, those who can't even do fast food jobs right. At that point just go get on disability because your fucked.
To be fair I will occasionally get someone in the tech support sector who knows their shit but it's few and far between and its always a welcome surprise.12 -
That feel when a customer denies writing you a service review (only one sentence), because her website went offline one time. We're not even the hoster of the website. She decided in not paying more for a more professional hoster, even after our recommendation. We even spent time resolving the issue with the hoster without charging that blonde fuck our rates. Don't I just love working for customers 🙂2
-
Customer: "no obligation quote: upgrading 20 pc from ME to XP."
Sales dept.: "what? Lol?" *incredibly expensive ME to Windows 10 upgrade service quote*
Customer: *accepted*1 -
!rant
I just made my API in my laravel and I understand how it works! It may seem like not a lot, but I got from far.
Just came two years ago in this industry as I worked as a customer service agent for a hostingcompany. I entered a whole new area what I immediatly got into at the time. Mind I already was studying Biomedical labresearch at the same time and was the IT guy in the family. Well, think back then I was just googling and fixing shit most of the time.
I was 21 at the time and began to learn everything I could learn in my position and soon it was not enough and wanted to learn more by working parttime(study already asks a lot of time). I soon applied as Junior System Engineer within the same company without prior education and got the job! And I'm back feeling I entered a new area where you feel you can do so much by just learning how it works. Now I want to learn to develop in PHP so I may make another step further.
Not a rant, but I want to share my experience as labrat starting to someting programming(did some bio-informatics, which was really interesting but with less emphasis on programming but more on data analysis). Still got a gigantic of list I want to learn from languages and frameworks to orchestration systems. -
When you are discussing about a customer issue with a service that you are using for offer your product and to understand the issue you ask a screenshot.
Later you receive the screenshot in Dutch (we are Italians) and is quite impossible to understand.
Few seconds later you remember that Google Translate for Android support the text recognition and save the day.
I appreciated a lot the Google's service quality also if I block all their trackers.2 -
I bought tickets for a friend of mine to visit me. She cancelled. I purchased travel insurance from Expedia. I have to now cancel one flight through Expedia, the return through the airline, and file a separate claim to get the money back. I hope they don't want me to prove she's sick, since she isn't (she's just a terrible person and I knew she'd pull this shit).
I hate the entire way the airline industry works. This is bullshit.
I hate the entire airline booking system.1 -
Another 'fun' rant
Wrote a new server application and got the request from customer services to make it compatible with a slightly older DB version.
Today, CS asked me to install everything on the customer's test environment so I made a build and installed it there.
Wanted to run the service, no .Net framework 4.7.1 installed. Fine, download the installer ...
Start installing .Net framework 'unsupported OS'. Started looking into it. Customer is still running an old unsupported Windows Server 2008 ...
Asked some colleagues whether this was normal. Apparently, yes.
Seems CS isn't capable of telling customers to at least have a supported windows version when they want our software. As if security issues due to people here not understanding TCP/IP isn't enough, we now have security issues due to old, unsupported Windows versions.
Note to self: never trust anyone who says that 'security is the most important thing in our software enviornment'. -
I did some online shopping on the weekend. And oh man, this retailer’s checkout had so many problems.
I placed an order for a 2022 edition of their magazine. My confirmation page lists the 2020 edition. I didn’t get a confirmation email and I’m sure my email was right.
I chat with customer service and they said my order was for their car buying guide. You bet my my response was what the fuck.3 -
Screw AIX! More importantly screw the IBM designer that though cache batteries were a good way to monitize their platform to help validate the service contracts. I guess it "works", but at what cost?
Just lost the last 4 business days going down this rabbit hole with a customer's server.
Edit: Quick note, yes, the customer is on track for a migration soon.8 -
This just in as a change request from a customer:
"$CUSTOMER has requested to change the middle image of the invitation email from a male of color to a caucasian female to better match their demographic."
Wow.10 -
Fucking google 2 step auth and their lack of customer service.
I have my account setup with my phone and a backup email account. No backup keys, since I only found out about those today! Thanks for letting me know this late in the game -.-
And yet. After I made a clean install of the os on my laptop. Tried to log back into my account. I am not getting text messages or emails to my backup emails (even though its allegedly sent.... And no its not in the junk mail) to validate my 2 factor auth.... Like fuck you!!!
If you gonna give us the ability to fort knox our accounts. At the bare minimum have some customer support to at least be train to answer a phone and tell me if your servers are having an issue or something. Im so in the fucking dark here and cant access shit.1 -
Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.
During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).
Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.
I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.
30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.
I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.
Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :) -
Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.4
-
I remember few years back when I had subscribed to this ISP, where few months on subscription worked flawlessly. Then it was all downwards from there. Customer care never answered. Charged for bloddy whole month whilst the working was just for 2 weeks. People subscribing to this ISP had a facebook group named ISP Victim. Was forced to change my ISP.
Now, few days back they put up a stall in an IT exhibition. I went up and signed in for their service. Now they call me for setting up their network, either i tell them am not available or dont answer at all. I do the same to them what they did to me. That utmost pleasure HAHA. I shared this idea in the facebook group and people are starting to do the same.
I feel like a con artist now. -
Digistore24 is a steaming pile of shit!
The whole product creation and purchase integration is covered by ugly smelling donkey shit. This whole dumb service is made by idiots.
The 'scripts' they provide to throw at your server for generic customer handling is a joke. Just a raw php mess. But nothing works and debugging this piece of shit is nearly impossible because they don't even provide a proper documentation on how they make the request to your machine.
🤬2 -
Started my very first (summer) job as an IT agent in customer service for my city less than two weeks ago and finally moving out from the formations to answer the phone alone.
I must've listened to around 30 calls and already there's stories I could make tales of.
I now understand the job of customer service. -
A user didn’t remember creating an account and didn’t understand why they received an “account created” email. Best case: this person just forgot. Worst case: someone impersonated them.
I look up this person’s order history and see only one order in the database. The account was created right after the order. Order was for $10k. I’m thinking, oh shit was there a fraudulent payment?!
I dig deeper and see it’s actually for a membership renewal. And our records are showing a birthdate for 1937. Now I’m thinking, ok I have a high roller who is very old. So I have to be REALLY careful about my response to this person.
I manage to reproduce the scenario and…it’s totally user error. The person just forgot they created an account. I’m letting customer service handle the correspondence for this. Sorry CS. -
I feel like a fucking god now!
We run a webshop and we are in contract with the national post office. Every time there is an update to their program I fear ahead of time what will be fucked up again.
After today's update we weren't able to open any shippment list we just saw a mile long error message. After the customer care couldn't figure out the problem, and the suggested solution might take up to 2days, and it is basically only a new customer file, i fired up my good old sqlite viewer friend, to chek if I am lucky...
Guess what! That shit is using unsecured sqlite dbs, so i've had no problem examining and even rewriting the values. So checking the logs and scraping the DB I've found the problem.
Apparently some asshole thought that deleting a service but keeping all of its references in other tables scattered around is a good fucking idea. And take it customer care, the new customer file won't fix shit, because it was in the global DB. I swear i am getting more familiar with that piece of garbage then the ones who made it.
On top of that the customer care told us, that if we couldn't manage to send the shippment list with the program we are not elligible for our contractual prices.
It is not enough that I had to fix their fucking shit program, they also "would like to charge us" because their pogram isn't working. What a fucking great service. (At least the lady on the telephone was friendly)1 -
As mentioned in one of my comments earlier, I am learning web development. And as such would like a web hosting service that is affordable and has instant customer support.
Suggestions ?12 -
Bank releasing new ui and posting that they’re pro client company while me waiting second week for papers.
What times we live on where fancy ui is more demanded then cutting customer service time.4 -
This is how my macbook keybboard writes the letter "b" it’s not happening all the time though, sometimes it outputs b and and other times bb, wtf I only pressed it once. And it's happening randomly, fuck this shit, I cant even take it to apple customer service and leave it there for a week or more. I guess I'm living with it and don't bbother fixing it. fuck b errr6
-
I fucking despise making whatever website that needs to send emails.
The final user won't probably receive the emails bc of spam, the customer wont like this and blame me or the company I work for, but never actually PAY for an email service to send emails.
And almost nothing works with the old-ass domains here in Italy, but people will still use those old-as-fuck emails just because they can't make a new one on gmail or outlook.1 -
Lazy piece of shit deliveryman simply stating that nobody was at home when in fact, the only person that wasn't there was him. No bell was ringing and my phone didn't receive any calls either. Customer service wasn't even that surprised when I asked them about it.
"Yeah, I tried to call the guy, but he wouldn't answer. I'm gonna try sending him again"
Boi, just yeet that bitch from your business!3 -
Customer Service(cs): clients complaining our site crashes on their computer
Support: they dont have enough resources, its their computer
CS: customers still complaining, how do we fix this?
Support: tell them to get a better computer
CS: lets borrow their information and see whats going on
Support: reluctantly moves customer data over
CS: I dont see anything wrong here. It works just fine
Support: ... ... ... -
Shipping company sending e-mails regarding cases to our ex-Intercom addresses instead of our registerd contact e-mail.
Intercom was turned off months ago.
I can not reach any old communication.
Of course certain claims expire... and we're ending up with sad and mad customers.
Let me be the shitpole to fix it... again.
FML, where's my long awaited customer service colleague!? /sadface -
The word "shift" in reference to a workday should NEVER be used in a dev environment. There is noservice that needs to constantly be maintained, thats what customer support is for. A shift gives the mentality that you have a set time that you are responsible for a service.
Devs are responsible for finishing a product on a deadline; that is not a shift, that is a fucking workday. I especially hate it when managers refer to them as shifts, because it shows just how little they understand what the devs are doing. They think of bug fixes like they think of flipping burgers; a task that performs a service. It's not a service, stop acting like it is.13 -
I once had to write an http interceptor for a distributed api. The interceptor needed to use the request context and the user profile to work out if a particular type of content had previously been accessed. Anyway there were two methods to get the user profile getUserC and getUserD, turns out C stood for cache D stood for database. Of course I called getUserD I effectively wrote a database distributed denial of service tool into our app 😬 we got a call from our customer complaining that their exadata servers where grinding to a complete halt2
-
It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.
About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)
I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)
Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.
TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.6 -
The customer service dept at Koss Headphones sent me an adapter gratis for my Pro 4/AA headphones so I could listen to loud rock and roll on my pc. I've been using Koss exclusively since I rec'd a pair for Christmas in 1971. Despite the natural deterioration in sound quality on a PC, I found I could hear more on certain Rolling Stones soundboards [the ones in question are Philadelphia 1972 and New York City a week later]. So I penned a rather whimsical email to Michael Koss, who actually replied with a letter, the kind we used to lick stamps for and put in a mailbox.
OK, that PC died. And the HP I have somehow has a really loose jack so the whole mechanism will slide out if you move the least little bit. It happened so often I became shell shocked about listen to loud music on my headphones at night when my nabes were sleeping because I didn't want to wake anybody up.
Finally, after too much jiggling, the end bit of the adapter got stuck in the headphone jack. Koss sent me another adapter gratis. Last night, I got out my headphones, removed the new adapter from its envelope, and inserted tweezers into the jack to pull the broken off bit out.
Except the broken off bit slid deeper into the jack. On my own, I have been able to rig the pc so I can use the speakers. And a friend who can remove the bit of the jack stuck in the jack will be over in a couple of days.
I went online and googled the methods others have used to remove broken off bits. That was worth the keystrokes!
In any case, I just wanted to say something about the irony of expecting the problem to be over and then having a few days more to live with the broken bit. -
!! WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE!!
So my Xbox one broke down and I want it to be replaced, since it is out of warranty , I don’t mind paying for a replacement(I heard somewhere they have an offer where you pay a small amount for a new one)
But those fuckers aren’t human, not metaphorically, I mean literally , you can’t call/chat with a human , the only time you can contact a human is after 7:30 fucking PM.
Royal fuck in the nuts witha hammer, you’re Microsoft , not some porn company which is only in one country ,please have a “working” customer service, recommend you guys, before going to buy a Microsoft product , just try to connect to microsoft , you’ll probably end up buying something else
P.S. the image below shows how the only time I can connect to a human is after 7:30PM - 7:00 AM, and no emails too don’t work4 -
!rant
This is fucking how you do it!
Ticketmaster UK had a "data security incident" where they don't really know if any data was actually leaked/stolen/"accessed by an unknown third-party" — their response:
1. Disable the compromised service across their platforms
2. Send a mail to any customer that may have been affected (I got one in Danish because I had only interacted with them through a Danish subsidiary)
2b. All notified customers have their passwords reset and must go through the "Forgot password" process; the _temporary_ password they sent me was even pretty nicely random looking: ";~e&+oVX1RQOA`BNe4"
3. Do forensics and security reviews to understand how the data was compromised
3b. Take contact to relevant authorities, credit card companies, and banks
4. Establish a dedicated website (https://security.ticketmaster.co.uk/...) to explain the incident and answer customer questions
5. "We are offering impacted customers a free 12 month identity monitoring service with a leading provider. To request this service please visit [this page]"
EDIT: As mentioned and sourced in the first comment, the breach was apparently noticed by a banking provider and reported to Ticketmaster on the 12th of April and later to Mastercard on the 19th of April.
Ticketmaster's internal investigation found no evidence of breach (which makes sense, as it wasn't an internal breach), but when Mastercard issued an alert to banks about it on the 21st of June, Ticketmaster followed up by finding the actual breach and disabling the breached third party service on the 23rd of June.
I still think they did the right thing in the right way...2 -
Where are those times when nothing worked?!
Now everything works right after tremendous hustle.
okay I'm pissed off because of 3 coffee places sucked either with itnernet, or no customer service . or just closed.
then my freaken headphones.
the last one is just shippable decided that my browser is not defined.
lessons ! -
I've started to get more into the TOR idea over the last couple of weeks.
I know I'm way to "non protective" of my privacy but changing would mean I'd have to break many habits and stop using things I'm used to.
A couple years back (I guess it was in like 8th grade or so) I had a presentation in German (my first language) for an extra mark. It was about tor. In the process of researching all of it I learned quite a lot about it. All of this knowledge has stuck to me the whole time, unused.
Fast forward to today, I've finally decided to use the couple of bitcoins I have (like 15€ or so) from my home mining experiment to rent a vps for a tor relay. First, I was lucky enough to find a service provider that accepts bitcoin for a 3€. They advertised "Fair use Traffic", later found out, after committing for three months since I was like "yeah... will be fine", in the customer panel there is a graph that shows me that I have used x% of 1.5 TB... I guess the customer support will get an email from me asking what "Fair use" exactly means... But that's fine... Oh... And ipv6 wasn't a thing to be found...
To wrap it up... I've now got a 2 weeks old little tor relay <3
(I didn't wanted to put it on my main vps where I have 200mbit guaranteed at unlimited for 5€ a month since that's where I have my mail server running and a hidden service for my next cloud)1 -
Calls phone company to ask what's wrong with the internet connection.
Customer Service: Please turn off your modem, wait 10 seconds then turn it on again.
Me: Do you honestly think I didn't do that a hundred times already? -
I'm so damn tired of being asked to set up "QC's" to check for data our client is supposed to be sending and alert them when it's considered "past due". Our customers pay us to manage and analyze the data they send us. If they don't send us data, that's their problem. Why all of a sudden is it my job to micromanage these people and remind them how/when to do their job?? I'm having enough trouble juggling all of the shit on our side of customer requests, but now I have to worry about making sure they handle the shit they are responsible for on their side?
Otherwise, if we don't remind them, then they yell at us like we dropped the ball. "Why didn't you tell us we didn't send you that data that we told you we were going to send!?"
But seriously. I get it. It's good customer service. And I'd rather someone alert me if I had a process break that was supposed to be sending data on a regular basis and I didn't realize it wasn't working how I intended. I get it. I'm just venting. I'm honestly more worked up about my ever growing backlog that I am never going to get caught up with at this rate. -
Opinions please. When end user is not paying for service, who is my customer? For example public facing government project2
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At old e-commerce job, some orders were coming through with most of the shipping info missing. The only info filled out was the State. When we looked at Heap, we could see the user was filling in those fields. There was both frontend and backend validation for required form data, so the user shouldn’t have been able to checkout without an address.
When I looked at the BE logic, I saw addresses were retrieved from our database by using a method called GetOrCreateDefaultAddress. When the website couldn’t find the address in the db, it created a new one where the only address field that was filled in was the state.
Unfortunately, this default address creation was happening after the submit button had been hit. There was no logic to validate the address this late in the checkout because the earlier form validation in the process should have caught this.
The orders did have email addresses, so customer service did have a way to contact the customer. I have no idea what happened to the user’s address. Was it never saved? Did it get caught up in a cron job to delete old users and addresses from the db??2 -
OK, I've got a couple customers I provide e-mail hosting for, but recently it's been...more trouble than it's worth, to put it simply. I'm looking to offload that part of what I do onto another service.
Does anyone have any recommendations for e-mail hosting services? Bonus points if they have good customer support.3 -
I don't even know if the shitty rant gets through this unreliable service I pay for with my money. I want to fucking wrap my hand in that money, light it up and fucking beat your teeth out while shoving this fucking money down your greedy, second arseholes. Honestly, what am I paying you for. These last couple of days your service was less reliable than a drunkard behind the wheel trying to drive in a straight line. Exactly this fucking week where there's a fucking hackathon. This very fucking week l where I got to be the team leader, you make me look like a fucking unreliable internet twat who just talks big. This very fucking week I'm given a internet service that doesn't even let me communicate with my team mates. Why do you dare to display fucking 3g? Is the the force my fist should take? Is it the fucking amount of gallons of acid you want to be showered with? Well fucking pay that shit with the money you earned. Just let me fucking work, let me give my best, give me a fucking way to look at the docs, give me a fucking way to test my code (chat bot), give me a fucking way to tell you to go fuck yourself using your fucking antennas, maybe thst will help.
Kindly, a pissed of customer who's rage makes the heatwave look like a lesser evil.1 -
One of the reasons why I wanted to become a software developer is because I see so many products or services taking the easy way out, at the cost of killing customer expectations. For example, I was told about JobTrack.io, which is supposed to help manage job searching by keeping track of applications and their statuses. But almost as quickly as I was told, my mind goes into automatic promise defense mode. And rightfully so, because the service turned out to be almost as monotaneous as the job search itself! Not as seamless as I'd need it to be to get started right away.
Now, maybe there's a slight chance I don't know wtf I'm talking about here. But, what's stopping this product from using an email client that runs server side, to interface with the user's main inbox, to run sentiment analysis on emails for detecting job application submissions? Such functionality would obviously need permission from the end user, so there are no surprises that some 3rd party app is sorta kinda monitoring your emails. And of course measures should be taken to avoid detecting anything beyond the contextual lines of: "Thank you for applying to so and so", or "We've recieved your application! Next steps".
Present those detections to the user to confirm. And do the same thing for rejections and offers. Shouldn't be that hard especially when most sites these days allow you to sign in with Google, and that Google marks these particular emails as "Important"; which further filters the detection process, and partially does JobTrack's job for them.
Honestly, I think the app has promise, and hope this is just a case of starting off small. -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
--------------------------
There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))5 -
Does anyone else sometimes make customer support people do things that you're just too lazy or don't want to do?
I'm especially bad about this if I'm looking into a service and they have a chat person that pops up. Since you bugged me while I was trying to do my research, how about you just answer all these questions I have so I don't have to click through your site. -
Before he began dropping the 20K proposed to remodel my flat, I told my father I much preferred a contractor who was recommended by someone I knew, as opposed to using a big corporation like Home Depot. FAMOUS LAST... a neighbour in my building highly recommended the contractor we chose. And, week 7 [or is it 8?] of what was proposed to take no longer than two weeks has begun afresh!
On Friday the fellow who is the owner of the contract remodeling company was here touching the paint. He was here because I forbade the two painters he sent to do the initial painting job.
My internet cut out suddenly around 1300 Friday. He set to leave for the weekend shortly after that. I mentioned the outage to him. The essence of his reply was that there was no way it could have had anything to do with him. The following day, my internet provider sent a tech out to diagnose the problem. What was the problem? The head of the remodeling firm removed a face plate from the wall where there were telephone wires and disconnect them when he tore the wires as he replaced the face plate.
Although the tech told me he wasn't going to charge my account the $85.00 fee for his services because the outage was caused within my flat, I wish to be sure of this. Which brings us to the punchline.
My internet provider is a lame ass business model, dreamed up by a squint-eyed ex-circus monkey, never well endowed in the top story, and now just plain sad.
There were some 911 outages in Washington State last Thursday night. All during the day Friday when you dialled their freephone #. the recorded announcement, before saying anything else, told you they were experiencing heavier than usual call volumes, and my wait would be greater than `10 minutes. Fine. What fried my La Croix silk was that after their customer service dept closed for the weekend, that outgoing message remained.
Today, I wanted to contact my provider to see if they would know if the $ was going to be charged to my account. After pressing the 'send' key, my computer came back with an error message, saying they were having technical difficulties. So, I went on over to the 'chat' page. There's nothing to click on to take me to this enfabled location. So, can't reach them by phone unless I want to hear, every 30 seconds whether or not I wish to, how sorry they are for my delay.
A few years ago I would've used this as an excuse to have a technicolour meltdown. The reason I'm posting this is that I am now able to see beforehand what I'll be doing to myself getting upset over the circumstances. When I do reach somebody, I'm going to tell them as lightly as possible, that if they were an airline, I wouldn't board any of their aircraft. Ever. -
Learn to Contact with Facebook Customer Service?
Facebook is most preferred social networking platform but there is also some issues arise while using this site. At that time, you simply need to contact team associates who are live at Facebook Customer Service. Simply take advice on the problems you have been suffering from at the comfort of your home. Here, experts will answer you with the simplest troubleshooting steps to eliminate your issues once and for all. https://emailcontacthelp.com/facebo...1 -
Thought that it might be a good idea to ask this question here.
Im looking for a nice logging events service for a side project that is a b2b (so my clients got their own users). My targets are tracking users behavior/events/actions in the app while been able to shred the data that belongs to each customer. A great benefit would be having a solution that would allow me to export part of the data (in sql like way) so i could provide the users the option to download their users data as well.
Was thinking about mixpanel but i dont think they have any option to export the data via api. Heap analytics is also an interesting one, but their nice features are limited to corporates..
Any suggestions? Thanks!4 -
The following piece of advice will be for those aspiring for an IT service desk position:
When companies are looking to hire service desk agents, they're primarily looking for socially skilled people with strong communicative skills, rather than primarily technically skilled people. When I first joined the IT world, I went on different interviews for that position and across all of them there was one truth: all the interviewers were eyeballs-focused on my social and communication skills and a mere thin layer of technical skills was required (depending on how technical the service desk). In fact, I immediately got aggressively dismissed twice for two of those when I filled in a Myers-Briggs personality test according to my Sheldon-type personality (selfish, condescending etc). Conversely, when I applied for a new position and I faked that test into answering everything focused positively on the social aspect, I was an immediate top candidate.
Here's a definition from the ITIL Foundation course, chapter Service Management: Because of how lateral the function of the service desk has become today (not only used to solve technical issues, but also company-wide issues), the most important and valued skills when hiring a service desk agent are fully focused on empathy and soft skills and none of those are technical skills. This is because the service desk has people that are the front window of your company and thus you can't make social mistakes as to protect your company's reputation. That risk has to be minimized and you need the ideal people. The people who in fact solve the technical problems are behind a back-office and they are contacted by the service desk agents.
In the beginning, when I did my first service desk job, I also thought: "Oh, I'm going to have to convince them I'm this technical wizard". In the end I got hired for being able to explain technology in human language and because in the interview I successfully communicated and explained ideas to both the team manager and the CEO, not because I knew what goes on inside a computer. This is a very important distinction.
My friends have also been in service desk positions and ironically they were the most successful when they were empathetic slimeballs (saying: "of course, anything for you" while not meaning it, constantly making jokes), rather than people with integrity (those got fired for telling the customer they were wrong while being unfriendly).
I hope this helps.8 -
Yesterday, I told CS that it looks like a member created the account that the member claim they didn’t create. Member probably forgot or didn’t realize what they were doing.
CS asks me if I’m sure because this member is one of their higher tier members. Lol no matter what your membership level, user error happens. Because they can afford to drop $10k on a membership doesn’t make them infallible. But rich people are something else and don’t care about logic. So I understand why CS is hesitant to tell a rich person that the mistake wasn’t on our end.
Definitely wasn’t our mistake or a hacker. This specific user account’s creation has details that indicate user creation rather than someone else making it.
I feel bad that CS has to deal with the communication, but I’m also glad I escaped that life.1 -
Poll. At a first glance would you as a customer be more inlcined to sign up for a cloud service at 5.95 per month with a free 7 day trial or a free 7 day trial and 47.95 per year?2
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eva viva3. very specific german healthcare erp. bloated but with the false features, insufficient data dumping, expensive, bad service. needs a lot of devops workarounds. unfortunately you don't skip easily with 10+ years of customer data.
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What’s the best free live chat package or service for offering customer support in our mobile app and also on website. ? I found tawk and chatwoot…not sure what’s better1
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Hostinger have better customer service than Bluehost. Why is that ? I tried this like 5 times already.5
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Just bitched out the same customer service woman telling her I wish her and everyone like her would just die so I wouldn't have to waste another day recovering my own goddamn property i keep double paying for.
I'm sick of having to buy the same movies and games just so some butt sniffing pederast can have a pay check.
speaking of pederasts, table 2 just showed up. more assholes with potential copies in the same places. while two creepers i could also photograph sit behind me for some reason.
so sick of repetition.
and you fucking cunts wouldn't even need to be bothered with this if you hadnt stolen soooo much of my time without adequate recompense.
not that i'd of course agreed to this insanity.
but these people should have to suffer AND pay us.2 -
Microsoft support number is also known for the Microsoft Office suite, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems and the gaming console flagship is also tied up with the Microsoft support phone number. You can get the details at the Microsoft support number. If you are unable to resolve the issues even after reading the solution given on the website, you will get the chance to communicate with the Microsoft customer support number third-party service provider as well.
https://customerserviceshelpnumber.com/...2 -
all amazon customer service agents should be dragged to the edge of a pit, shot, dropped in and have raw sewage used to bury their bodies.
that about sums up a portion of what they deserve prior to their departure to hell.16 -
There's no way consumers like the fake typing noise when you're speaking to a robot on customer service. E.g. "Let me pull that up for you... CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK"
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AI FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE: ACTUAL PROJECTS INSIGHTS
https://sigma.software/about/media/...
When hearing ‘AI for Customer Service’ most would immediately think this is going to be ‘yet another article about chatbots’. No wonder. Chatbots have been one of the hottest topics recently. However, our experience shows that AI can be applied to many other areas of Customer Service business as well. And those possess even more potential to boost your business. -
Goddamnit ISP's. Yesterday I got transferred to another ISP because of a merger and till this moment I don't have internet, TV or phone (not that I was using the phone line but I am paying for it) and after being on hold for over an hour this morning with customer service I got told it can take them till fuckin monday to get the connection going again.
I'll repeat FUCKIN ISP'S!!!!!