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Accountability sinks

(aworkinglibrary.com)
493 points l0b0 | 1 comments | 19 Oct 24 23:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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rougka ◴[20 Oct 24 05:35 UTC] No.41893123[source]▶
I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought.

It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers.

Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat

I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but computers can only interact in the way the UI was designed, and no programmer accounted or cared for my scenario

The ground attendant couldn't have done anything of course because it wasn't part of the scope of her job, and this was the part of germany where nice was not one of their stereotypes.

Eventually I got a survey a week later about a different leg of the flight, so could I really complain there? that one was fine? I had a paranoid wonder if that was intentional

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m463 ◴[20 Oct 24 06:15 UTC] No.41893293[source]▶
Many businesses build walls around themselves like this.

Hiding the customer service number. Making an FAQ that is missing the common but time-consuming questions. Chatbots instead of people.

I remember when amazon sent me a package once, said it was delivered, but it was nowhere to be found. There was no way to get help. They did have an FAQ at the time that said to check in the bushes.

What was annoying was the search auto-complete had many variations of "package not found says delivered"

Now, it is a little more filled out but still.

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gregmac ◴[20 Oct 24 06:35 UTC] No.41893383[source]▶
I just switched ISPs, and the new one has one of the most obnoxious phone processes I've ever interacted with.

I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want to try rebooting." (Pause)... "thank you for your call click"

First off, rebooting doesn't solve my problem. But I guess I have to try anyway?

So I call back, this time I do pick to reboot, and get "your modem will reboot in the next few minutes, and could take up to 10 minutes to come online. If things still aren't working, try our online support chat"

So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.

Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)

Made me wonder if I should have switched.

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1. maccard ◴[20 Oct 24 09:46 UTC] No.41894243[source]▶
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot.

This surprises me - as a programmer you should realise that reboots can often help. Cache invalidation is one of the notoriously hard CS problems and an awful lot of systems will start fresh on reboot.

> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)

My current ISP is better, but my previous ISP cycled IP addresses at 2am (and lost connectivity for about 30 seconds at the same time) on a Friday night. I would semi-frequently be up playing games at that hour, and it was about 50/50 as to whether devices on my network would survive the blip. Rebooting the router had a 100% success rate.

I currently (unfortunately) have a google wifi mesh system. It works great, except about once a month it reports that absolutely everything is fine, all tests pass from my mobile device, but my laptop has no internet connectivity. Rebooting fixes it just fine.

> How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out?

Firmware is still software, like it or lump it. Modem firmware has been shitty for a long time. A major ISP [0] in the UK had an issue with their firmware that caused massive latency spikes under load. Alsom Power loss happens sometimes. The modem/router has to be able to turn on in the first place, so a "reboot" is just going through that process again. It's attempting to return to a "last known good".

[0] https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Hub-3-Com...