“Well tell your daughter good luck for me at her track meet on Saturday, and you enjoy your niece’s birthday party!” click

Alright, cable package successfully canceled.

Software developers are in many ways glorified customer service representatives. We take people’s feedback and complaints, and do something about it (or not do something about it). The only difference is that engineering managers have the good sense to hide engineers from real people.

Think about developing software as if developers were call centers,

Oh, your report takes 10 minutes to generate, and you’ve spent the last 30 minutes bitching to me unproductively? Tell me more.

What a good developer would do is investigate the current computational efficiency, and see if we can’t optimize for response time. Being totally honest, if I’m answering the phone and you’re being unpleasant, my advice might be something more along the lines of “Try not using IE9” or “Your report might generate faster if you’re not fetching grab data for a fleet of 10,000 machines.”

Being nice has gotten me so much further in life than being unpleasant because - yes - those people are paid to help solve your problems; however, they aren’t paid based on the quality of their advice. Granted, you may hear more life stories than you ever wanted to know, but free cancellation on a cable package ain’t half bad.

P.S. If you’re filing a defect for a developer and don’t include any steps to reproduce, you will be received just as well as a man screaming profanity into a phone.