# Programmer Rant - Why can't most of us offer a decent support?
Hey everyone,
today I want to talk about a topic which makes me very mad and sad at the same time.
In the last years as a developer, I noticed that the worst possible customer support you can get is the support by programmers themselves.
In whatever kind of project I worked until now I always tried to offer the best possible support to all of my users
since I really want to make people with my creations happy and I want as many people using my work as possible.
This makes sense since if no one uses it, I wasted my time on this project.
And, in all those years I always received a lot of praise for my work, people were usually extremely happy with the support I offered them
and often, also because of that, decided to support my projects and tell other people about them.
But, In the last year, I went through some situations which left me really mad.
And I want to use this post to reflect about those situations and, I hope that as many programmers as possible will read this and might reflect their
behavior to improve this situation.
Okay, let's start with something that started a few months ago and peaked yesterday.
Minecolonies has some compatibility problems with another mod, where there is, unfortunately, no workaround on our side.
Therefore, I opened an issue on their Github, which didn't end up resolving it and tried to contact them on their Irc and discord.
Unfortunately, this never resulted in anything, since no one ever responded there.
So, yesterday this peaked when I decided to go to their discord again.
I arrived there and asked them about the issue, a few minutes passed by and my question was 2 pages behind already.
I looked at the hotbar of online users and saw that around 20 staff people were listed as online. I looked at one who seems to be fitting and actually online and decided to ping him to ask him for support.
You don't want to imagine the shitstorm that broke out after that where, funnily not the admin himself, but his friendly footsoldiers started trying to teach me that pinging someone is completely inappropriate behavior.
End of the story, out of the nothing our issue raised interest and a PR was created which will resolve this in the future and I had to ask myself if all this trouble couldn't have been avoided at the first time.
What could we learn from this?
a) When you're a dev and you offer a communication channel, prepare to be pinged, that's when the channel is for
b) When you are on the communication channel prepare to be questioned and prepare to answer politely, or just offer github issues if you are not able to communicate politely.
Another situation arose a few weeks ago, I went again on a discord of a Mod which had severe issues on our server.
I arrived there and asked if there was anyone here to give me support.
The first thing I got was a "Sigh" of one of the mod devs and I immediately thought to my self "That's starting well already pal".
I told him the situation and he said: "Yes, not my fault, lib x I use breaks that every now and then, wait for an update".
So I asked him, if there is no workaround or anything else he can do since if his dependency breaks this now or then, he might even put up a switch in his code to resolve this problem in the future, but he was not interested at all in doing anything about it.
What could we learn from this?
If you create a software and you want to maintain it, really maintain it, if something you do, often breaks in connection with other dependencies - either try to contact them to resolve this or try to build a workaround in your code. Because if you don't do this, just stop this project right there, your software will probably cause more headache than help anyone in many cases and its just not worth continuing here.
But that's not all, another mod caused issues on our server, basically allowing any player to duplicate blocks, grief others, or just be OP in general.
Therefore, we contacted the mod author and asked him kindly, if it would be possible to implement a configuration in this mod to allow server owners to disable certain aspects. The answer was fast "No, it's like that because I want it that way, the end user is not always right" and "I don't care if a f** server uses my mod or not".
What could we learn from this?
If you code something and let people use it, you should ask yourself whether you code it for yourself or for the end users? If you code it for the end users -> Who should you listen to? - The End-user, especially when it's about configurations!
These situations I described above were just the top of the mountain of what I had to work with the past year and it's actually really sad and it had me raise the following questions.
- Do most of us programmers really think they're superior to the rest?
- Don't they care if what they spend many hours of work with is really used?
- Don't they care if people are happy with what they create?
We have to be careful with what we do, at the moment there are not a lot of programmers out there, but if we don't learn how to deal with other people, companies won't be very happy with our service, even if the code is perfect and a new gigantic generation of future coders is just waiting to pass you on your career ladder.
Besides that, employers lose averagely 22 minutes per day just dealing with computer related issues, that makes us programmers, if we don't do things right, also a bottleneck for company progress [1].
Since 22 minutes per day, are easily 2 work weeks a year lost just because we programmers didn't think of the end user when doing something.
I hope you guys agree with me on this one.
See you the next time.
[1] https://www.employtest.com/news/how-much-time-are-your-employees-wasting-on-computer-issues