My favourite variant of this merrygoround is when they ask you to demonstrate the issue live in a Teams session, you do so, and there's this moment of silence followed by an "Oh... I see".

Then you assume, naively, that this means that they've recognised that there really is a product problem and will go off and fix it. However, then in turn the support tech needs to reproduce the the issue to the development team.

They invariably fail to do so for any number of reasons, such as: This only happens in my region, not others. Or the support tech's lab environment doesn't actually allow them to spin up the high-spec thing that's broken. Or whatever.

Then the ticket gets reject with "can't reproduce" after you've reproduced the issue, with a recorded video and everything as evidence.

If you then navigate that gauntlet, the ticket is most typically rejected with "It is broken like that by design, closed."

I recompiled OpenSSL to make s_server -www return the correct, static XML blob for a .NET application that was buggy to make a reproducer for them that didn't rely on our product at all and which could be self-contained on a very barren windows VM they could play with to their heart's content and which didn't even care about the network because everything was connecting via loopback, so they couldn't blame that, eitehr.

Turns out there was a known bug in Microsoft schannel that had yet to be patched and they'd wasted weeks of our effort by not searching their own bug tracker properly.

It'd kind of sad, how the market went. I suppose there are pluses too.

But back in the 80s and 90s, margins were significantly higher. If you look at hardware, I recall selling hardware with 30% margin, if not more... even 80% on some items.

Yet what came with that was support, support, support. And when you sell 5 computers a month, instead of 500, well.. you need that margin to even have a store. Which you need, because no wide-scale internet.

On the software side, it was sort of the same. I remember paying $80 for some pieces of software, which would be like $200 today. You'd pay $1 on an app store for such software, but I'd also call the author if there was a bug. He'd send an update in the mail.

I guess my point is, in those days, it was fun to fix issues. The focus was more specific, there was time to ply the trade, to enjoy it, to have performant, elegant fixes.

Now, it's all "my boss is hassling me and another bug will somehow mean I have to work harder", which is .. well, sad.

I totally understand that from the perspective of individual employees: they have little incentive to do more than the bare minimum to close tickets. But this behavior is typically a symptom of broken corporate culture and failure to align internal metrics. For every customer who takes the trouble to submit a formal bug report there are likely many others who just live with it, and badmouth you to other customers. Doing deep investigations of even minor bug reports also tends to expose other, more serious latent bugs. And root cause analysis allows you to create closed-loop solutions to prevent similar future bugs.

Large monopolistic tech companies like Apple and Microsoft can afford to ignore this stuff for years because there are few realistic alternatives. But longer term eventually a disruptive competitor comes along who takes product quality and customer service more seriously.

It's a false dichotomy - something being "a simple cost/benefit analysis" doesn't remove the ethical dimension, and can absolutely be nefarious. A movie villain saying "it was just business" doesn't make their actions less villainous.

I’d argue that there should be no higher business priority than shipping a product you already sold. If you sold a product and your customer spends their time documenting exactly why and how you sold them something that’s broken, you should make that a high priority. As a natural progression, you’ll start shipping less buggy / better tested products and that’s how you unlock yourself from the obligation you made to your existing customers to do other work.

Not directed at you of course, just the proverbial “you” from the frustration of a purchaser of software.

Or even non-software tickets at large corporations. I reported a water dispenser filling too slowly at my office because it took me a few tries just to fill my 1L water bottle. They said it was fixed and closed it.

It was not fixed. So I took a video of myself refilling my water bottle, attached it to the ticket, and re-opened it. They actually fixed it after that. The video was 2m12s long (and I spent god knows how long making the video file small enough to attach to the ticket lol)

As an open source maintainer, I feel that statement is really unfair. Yes, we do sometimes close bug reports without evidence they are fixed. But:

- We owe you nothing! And the fact that people still expect maintainers to work for them is really sad, IMHO.

- Unlike corporate workers, nobody is measuring our productivity therefore we have no incentive to close issues if we believe they are unfixed. That means that when we close the issue, we believe it has a high chance of being fixed, and also we weigh the cost of having many maybe-fixed open issues against maybe closing a standing issue, and (try to) choose what's best for the project.

Take a look at Anthropic's repo. They auto-close issues after just a few weeks.

I don't think I've seen an issue of theirs that wasn't auto-closed.

Fuck stalebot.

Please tell us where you work so we can avoid all of your company’s software. Unless it’s Microsoft, because we’ve already seen the results of that attitude there.

Yes that's a thing, but never with external customers in public betas

Back when I worked at Apple I would just try it in whatever I had installed. If it didn't reproduce I'd write "Cannot reproduce in 10.x.x" and close it. Maybe a third were like that, duplicates of some other issue that was resolved long ago.

Anyone that attached a repro file to their issue got attention because it was easy enough to test. Sometimes crash traces got attention, I'd open the code and check out what it was. If it was like a top 15 crash trace then I'd spend a lot longer on it.

If the ticket was long and involved like "make an iMovie and tween it in just such and such a way" then probably I'd fiddle around for 10-15 minutes before downgrading its priority and hope a repro file would come about.

There were a bunch of bug reports for a deprecated codec that I closed and one guy angrily replied that I couldn't just close issues I didn't want to fix!

Guess what buddy, nobody's ever going to fix it.

The oldest bug like that I ever fixed was a QuickDraw bug that was originally written when I was 8 years old but it was just an easy bounds check one liner.

But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there.

Companies have no consciences.

Ooh this gives me an interesting passive-aggressive idea to counter pointless "is this still relevant" questions. "No, I haven't hit this in the last 2 days." "No, I haven't hit this since I gave up trying to do it with your tool." And so forth.

The less passive-aggressive version is to use this obviously-unhelpful answer of the obviously-unhelpful question, to actually have a conversation to get the PM to recognize that the default state of a ticket is in fact "no change." Ultimately that may turn into a stale bot if the PM realizes the policy they actually want is some sort of timeout, but at least it's not a time consuming meeting!

(Note, a cathartic thought experiment, but not really good manners to actually do!)

Absolutely spot on LOL

Damn. I've put quite a lot of effort into open source tools w.r.t. debugging and bugfixing, but yeah putting that for a corporate product that doesn't even respect you must be draining.

I used to think that there is no harm in keeping the bug open. I think if you honestly feel that you have the time and resources to go back to the bug and fix it, then by all means keep it open.

But I find that sometimes I can tell from experience that the IR is not actionable and that it will never be fixed. Some examples:

* There's not enough info to reproduce the issue and the user either can't or won't be able to reproduce it themselves. Intermittent bugs generally fall into this category. * The bug was filed against some version of the software that's no longer in production (think of the cloud context where the backend service has been upgraded to a newer version).

Sometimes the cost to investigate a bug is so high relative to the pain caused that it just closed as a WONTFIX. These sometimes suck the most because they are often legitimate bugs with possible fixes, but they will never be prioritized high enough to get fixed.

Or sometimes the bug is only reproducible using some proprietary data that I don't have access to and so you sometimes have no choice but to ask the bug filer "can you still reproduce this?".

Computer systems are complicated. And real-world systems consisting of multiple computer systems are even more complicated.

What is the use in keeping it open when no one will ever look at it again after it goes stale? It still exists in the system if you ever wanted to find it again or if someone reports the same issue again. But after a certain time without reconfirming the bug exists, there is no point investigating because you will never know if you just haven't found it yet or if it was fixed already.

Surely a few years worth of open but unverified bugs would cause some issues with reporting and such.

makes it very hard to lie with your metrics

I don't work at Apple, so I can't comment on that. But that doesn't always help. There's been plenty of times where I have a full HAR file from the user and I can clearly see that something went wrong, but that doesn't always mean I can reproduce the issue. (I recognize a HAR file doesn't represent the complete state of the world, but it's often one of the best things a backend developer can get)

That’s easy enough. The hard part is doing so without capturing a bunch of email, messages, and other private data that happens to be in memory at the time.

I've seen this in many teams and it always drives me nuts: "hey this ticket is old and we didn't bother, let's delete it to keep the board clean".

You feeling accomplished by seeing an empty list is not the goal!

It’s really a question of whether a team believes bugs are defects that deserve to be fixed, or annoyances that get in the way of shipping features. And all too often, KPIs and promotions are tied to the features, not the bugs.

Plus, I’ve been in jobs where fixing bugs ends up being implicitly discouraged; if you fix a bug then it invites questions from above for why the bug existed, whether the fix could cause another bug, how another regression will be prevented and so on. But simply ignoring bug reports never triggered attention.

Is it really programmers doing this, though?

These auto-closing policies usually originate from somewhere else.

I have been on the other side where I can't replicate/verfiy and the think the user would tell me if it was fixed. After exhausting myself and contacting the user only to find out it was resolved.

If you are looking at it from a business perspective, there is little value to fixing a bug that is not impacting your revenue.

Of course, the developers should be determining if the bug may have a greater impact that will or does cause a problem that impacts revenue before closing it - not doing that is negligent.

Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about.

As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated to fix anybody's bug.

It's not like they were nagging him about it - it's been years, and they had major releases in the mean time. Quite possible it was fixed as a side effect of something else.

Basically every single old bug report I've ever seen is essentially a red-herring that is usually not able to be reproduced anymore after N years and takes away time from focusing on newer and more solvable issues. I don't see the issue with removing that noise if it's no longer being reported, but to each their own I suppose.