Hi, bigcorp employee getting showered with tickets here.
I don't have enough time in the day to deal with the tickets where the reporter actually tries, let alone the tickets where they don't.
If I tell you to update your shit, it's because it's wildly out of date, to the point that your configuration is impossible for me to reproduce without fucking up my setup to the point that I can't repro 8 other tickets.
Back when I worked at Apple I would just try it in whatever I had installed. If it didn't reproduce I'd write "Cannot reproduce in 10.x.x" and close it. Maybe a third were like that, duplicates of some other issue that was resolved long ago.
Anyone that attached a repro file to their issue got attention because it was easy enough to test. Sometimes crash traces got attention, I'd open the code and check out what it was. If it was like a top 15 crash trace then I'd spend a lot longer on it.
If the ticket was long and involved like "make an iMovie and tween it in just such and such a way" then probably I'd fiddle around for 10-15 minutes before downgrading its priority and hope a repro file would come about.
There were a bunch of bug reports for a deprecated codec that I closed and one guy angrily replied that I couldn't just close issues I didn't want to fix!
Guess what buddy, nobody's ever going to fix it.
The oldest bug like that I ever fixed was a QuickDraw bug that was originally written when I was 8 years old but it was just an easy bounds check one liner.
But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there.
> But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there.
Except this same shit keeps happening with multiple teams.
Judging from your mention of QuickDraw, which was removed entirely from macOS in 2012, perhaps your Apple experience is now out of date.
> That the ~50000 engineers at Apple are conspiring to close your tickets in the exact same way. It's ridiculou
It's pretty clear from experience that the organization policy is to not provide feedback on bug submissions. Getting a 'check it if still reproduces or we'll close it in two weeks' message after 3 years is actually a fast turnaround.
Best I've gotten was on an issue I routed to a friend who worked at Apple who promised it would get looked at, but that I wouldn't hear back.
Microsoft wouldn't fix my issues either, but at least they got back to me in a timely fashion. Usually telling me it was a known issue that they weren't going to fix.
You don’t hear back because almost always your bug is a duplicate of some other one. They can’t share the original with you because it contains data from another customer or from inside the company.
Almost nobody is the first reporter in an OS with billions of users. The only useful thing about those long dupe lists was being able to scan them for one with easier repro steps.
But sometimes that duplicate marking is wrong or some subtly different issue so they ask you if it still reproduces in whatever version contains the fix before closing it.
That makes sense. But when you take 3-5 years to respond to my bug report, I'm going to take at least 3 months to respond to your response. And I'm probably not filing more bugs, because chances are I won't be at my current employer by the time you reply.
When you consitently burn bug reporters, sooner or later there's nobody to file bugs.
Because that's probably how long it took for someone to prioritize it.
Even if it's not fixed by the dupe ticket, the volume of bug reports makes it almost certain another ticket for the same issue will come up. And if it doesn't then it probably wasn't that relevant to anyone.
Not my tickets specifically. I don't think they're out to get me individually. On the contrary, this is a common practice, which affects many developers. I just happen to be relatively loud, as far as blogging is concerned.
Yes I understand that. ~50000 engineers aren't conspiring to close all tickets that way. It's a stupid line of thinking.
More than likely your steps to reproduce are too laborious to receive attention relative to the value fixing the bug would provide. That's why they're asking you to verify it still happens. Seems pretty simple right?
There's also a strong chance your ticket was linked as a duplicate of some other issue that was fixed in the beta and they want you to verify that's the case but they won't expose their internal issue to you for a variety of reasons.
> ~50000 engineers aren't conspiring to close all tickets that way.
I didn't say that either. It's happened to me only sporadically, but multiple times.
I agree with you that teams within Apple manage their own tickets. Perhaps some individual teams are declaring bug bankruptcy at some point, so only their bugs would go out for verification. I don't really know. I wish I did. What I do know is that multiple teams have done this at different points.
There's indisputably a company-wide DevBugs canned response for this. It's the same exact language every time. You can even Google it.
I think that's entirely dependent on the workload the company is placing on their support staff. If Apple decides the techs should be handling 10 tickets at once, then the techs have a choice:
1. Tell everyone to update their shit, and close tickets if they don't.
2. Waste several hours per day uninstalling and reinstalling 10 versions of the same program.
One of these will allow you to close lots of tickets immediately, and handle the remaining ones as efficiently as possible. Yay! Good job, peon! You get a raise!
The other approach will result in a deep backlog, slow turnaround times, and lower apparent output from management's perspective. Boo! Bad job, peon! You're fired!
Please tell us where you work so we can avoid all of your company’s software. Unless it’s Microsoft, because we’ve already seen the results of that attitude there.
I don't see how it's an unreasonable request. If you demand that I work with some ancient version, I then have to install and uninstall said program every time I work on your ticket specifically. You will be prioritized last, because my effectiveness is measured by how many tickets I close.
They're not. If there's nothing wrong with it, one could ask whether the person here would be okay sitting in a room with their supervisor, the head of the company, and 10 customers, say the same things they're saying here, and get a consensus that this is how this should all work out.
> If you demand that I work with some ancient version, I then have to install and uninstall said program every time I work on your ticket specifically.
You completely missed the point of the blog post. Apple was in the process of developing macOS 26.4 beta 4, and they wanted me to install the beta just to "verify" the bug.
Apple could test my bug with 26.4 beta 4 a heck of a lot easier than I could. Nobody was asking Apple to install some ancient version.
> my effectiveness is measured by how many tickets I close.
That was one of the points of the blog post: this is a perverse incentive from management.
Note what you did not say: "my effectiveness is measured by how many bugs I fix." So engineers are incentivized to close tickets even if the bugs they report are unfixed. This is how a company ends up with crappy, buggy software.
The parent comment is talking about the broader practice of people telling you to update and then repro again. That's a completely legitimate thing to ask, given both the perverse corporate incentives and the basic reality that version toggling makes a tech far less efficient at solving all tickets, not just yours.
I don't have enough time in the day to deal with the tickets where the reporter actually tries, let alone the tickets where they don't.
If I tell you to update your shit, it's because it's wildly out of date, to the point that your configuration is impossible for me to reproduce without fucking up my setup to the point that I can't repro 8 other tickets.