From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Frustrated with SGI support..
Date: 1 Jan 93 19:04:49 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA

In <34842@adm.brl.mil> andersen@marvin.ama.ttu.edu (Kim Andersen) writes:

| I have several SGI systems, all different models.  I was very happy with
| the hotline service the first couple years - they were very speedy and
| knowledgable.  HOWEVER, response time has increased dramatically (coupled
| with a seeming decrease in competence) over the past year and a half.
| Ever since 4.0.X was released.  Now I don't bother to call the hotline
| anymore because on the rare occasion that I get a return call, they have
| no clue anyway.
| 
| Sorry, guys, but that's my experience.

Well, along with 4.0.X, came the Indigo.  Between a whole new set of
of software to support (X11 and Motif), and many thousands of new
machines (and therefore customers), the support folks got rather
swamped.  It took them a while to hire (and train!) enough additional
people to catch up with the load.  Yes, they knew it was coming, and
tried to staff up ahead of time, but it turned out much worse (in terms
of numbers of machines and calls) than was expected.  That explains
much of the response time changes.  On the other hand, they changed
procedures (and are still changing them) to try to reduce the time to
the first callback.  They haven't always succeeded, but it has gotten
better overall.

Any of you who have ever supported software and hardware, either
as part of your job or informally, know that the greater the number of
products, the harder it is to even train people to ask the right
questions about the problem, let alone to answer them.


I'd also like to address another theme that has gone through
this thread.

I don't understand why *anybody* expects that the support people
would be able to answer everybody's questions (at least on the
first call, or maybe even the second)!  After all, I have (not
to be overly modest) a pretty wide breadth of knowledge of SGI's
software and hardware, and there are plenty of things it would
take me some time to find the answer to, or even to find out
who would know the answer.  I also know that sometimes it takes
3 or 4 exchanges to even get enough info to find out what the
problem is; some people seem to want you to pry the info out
of them.  I'm sure they don't see it that way, but believe me,
any of us answering questions, either as part of our jobs,
or informally, see it that way from time to time!

Sometimes the answer is just "it is a bug in the released
software, we don't know when it will be fixed, or how to
workaround it".  While that may seem to customers like the
support folks don't care, that is the answer that they get from
the R&D engineers.  To their credit, they will push back when
they get that answer, and if they start getting a lot of calls
about a particular problem, they push even harder to get a
better answer, and hopefully a fix or workaround.  Even so,
sometimes it just goes on the open bug list.

So, if you don't call support because you think you won't get an
answer, you have only yourself to blame if the bug/problem/lack
of features persists into the next N releases.  Sure, if we see
complaints of a problem on the net, *usually* somebody will turn
it into a bug report if we decide it is one (or even just fix
it then and there for the next release), but you can't count
on that happening.  In addition, some groups of engineers are
far less likely to read the net than others, and those of us who
do may not have any idea whether it is a bug or not if it is in
an area with which we aren't familiar.
--
Let no one tell me that silence gives consent,  |   Dave Olson
because whoever is silent dissents.             |   Silicon Graphics, Inc.
    Maria Isabel Barreno                        |   olson@sgi.com