Masscomp

[Guy Harris]

> >      If you are having problems with software bugs, they will let you talk
> >      to a software engineer If you are covered under a software contract.
> >	 ... 
> >      If you are not covered under a service contract, they will also let
> >	 you talk to a software engineer, for $80/hr.
> 
> This is a very bad company policy.  The objective of a small growth
> company is to develop/adapt software for their special purpose hardware
> that customers are satisfied with.  Bugs, which are inevitable, should
> be corrected.  In this case, the company is discouraging them 
> from being discussed by having an 80.00/hr fee.

The objective of a small growth company is to make money.  If all your
software engineers are tied up saying "RTFM" to customers, this makes it
harder to make money.  The $80/hr fee is a price for a service, and serves
to cut the demand so that it matches the supply of that service.  In this
case, it tempts people to save themselves money by actually Reading The
Manual before bitching to the vendor's technical support people.

I think Masscomp is no longer at the stage where they can afford to hold
every single customer's hand.  Back when a small growth company is *very*
small, it has considerably fewer customers, and they are taking a flyer on
that company's products and are more likely to be technically knowledgable.
As the company grows, it gets more calls from people who ask "why won't my
screen come on?" when they haven't plugged the machine in, or ask why the
machine is just typing everything back at them when they've just typed

	<commands>; grep

instead of

	<commands> | grep

or other such questions.  These questions need not even be "dumb", but
they're not the appropriate thing to bug a developer with.

Also, developers tend to get *very* grouchy and unproductive if they end up
having to deal with a question which really *is* dumb; grouchy and
unproductive developers tend not to develop products which help the small
growth company make money.

Yes, it's not as nice as having a direct hotline to the developers.  Nobody
ever said that life was fair.  (Also note that Knuth is far less likely to
be bothered by naive questions or comments about spelling errors - it's not
an appropriate comparison.)

	Guy Harris