As an engineer for a related company, I sometimes go and look at the support forums or tickets for my software.
I find hundreds or thousands of complaints. Many are legitimate bugs, and some are user stupidity ("I need to check my mums email but she won't give me her password, can you let me in anyway").
For those which are legitimate bugs, I know, through user metrics, that they only affect a tiny fraction <0.1% of the users. I, and the rest of the engineering team have to prioritize our team between fixing these bugs for the 0.1%, and making the product better for the 99.9%.
It can be a tough choice, but when you've decided that it's time to move on and develop new features, hearing about individual instances of rare bugs is no longer useful. We just aggregate how many users are impacted by each significant bug, and from time to time quash the top ones.
Manually editing a database entry for a single user is no longer privacy-justifiable, so basically the only fix we can do is to fix the bug for all users at once. And if the bug is only affecting 15 out of 300,000,000 users on a product that makes 1 cent per user per year, I can't afford to spend more than 30 seconds on it really, yet most bugfixes are at least a days work.
Thank you for taking the time for writing this and being so open.
However, I think this approach should be criticized. It's a very concrete improvement for the 0.1% of users dropped in favor of a very vague improvement for an unknown subset of the 99%. Also, the bugs have severe consequences for the users (as in the OP or the Dash case) it would be downright irresponsible to be customer of a company that acts like this.
That is great insight in how many software corporations prioritize tasks. However, rare bugs are often indicators of bigger problems, so it pays to at least investigate them. Not because of 0.1% of affected users, but because it might make things better for 99.9% as a consequence. Not all bugs are like that, of course, but some are.
Thanks for the insight. Makes me understand what is going on "on the other side". Although the message is a bit sad. If you don't scream loud enough it doesn't get fixed.
Steve Jobs seemed to have an ear or the 0.1% :) I am pretty certain one (rare) OSX bug got fixed because I emailed him.
I find hundreds or thousands of complaints. Many are legitimate bugs, and some are user stupidity ("I need to check my mums email but she won't give me her password, can you let me in anyway").
For those which are legitimate bugs, I know, through user metrics, that they only affect a tiny fraction <0.1% of the users. I, and the rest of the engineering team have to prioritize our team between fixing these bugs for the 0.1%, and making the product better for the 99.9%.
It can be a tough choice, but when you've decided that it's time to move on and develop new features, hearing about individual instances of rare bugs is no longer useful. We just aggregate how many users are impacted by each significant bug, and from time to time quash the top ones.
Manually editing a database entry for a single user is no longer privacy-justifiable, so basically the only fix we can do is to fix the bug for all users at once. And if the bug is only affecting 15 out of 300,000,000 users on a product that makes 1 cent per user per year, I can't afford to spend more than 30 seconds on it really, yet most bugfixes are at least a days work.