From experience with Microsoft (paid) support (after doing 5 tickets because it's never the right team and apparently moving tickets internally is for losers), they will ask for proof of the reproduction. And they will take every opportunity to shift the blame ("Oh I can see in the log you're running an antivirus, open a ticket with them. Closed").
I recompiled OpenSSL to make s_server -www return the correct, static XML blob for a .NET application that was buggy to make a reproducer for them that didn't rely on our product at all and which could be self-contained on a very barren windows VM they could play with to their heart's content and which didn't even care about the network because everything was connecting via loopback, so they couldn't blame that, eitehr.
Turns out there was a known bug in Microsoft schannel that had yet to be patched and they'd wasted weeks of our effort by not searching their own bug tracker properly.
Searching bug trackers has always been problematic unless you have an exact error message or code. Fortunately vendors like Linear are now embedding AI/LLM technology into their products, which helps a lot with fuzzy searching and with retroactively finding duplicate bug reports.
My favourite variant of this merrygoround is when they ask you to demonstrate the issue live in a Teams session, you do so, and there's this moment of silence followed by an "Oh... I see".
Then you assume, naively, that this means that they've recognised that there really is a product problem and will go off and fix it. However, then in turn the support tech needs to reproduce the the issue to the development team.
They invariably fail to do so for any number of reasons, such as: This only happens in my region, not others. Or the support tech's lab environment doesn't actually allow them to spin up the high-spec thing that's broken. Or whatever.
Then the ticket gets rejected with "can't reproduce" after you've reproduced the issue, with a recorded video and everything as evidence.
If you then navigate that gauntlet, the ticket is most typically rejected with "It is broken like that by design, closed."
It'd kind of sad, how the market went. I suppose there are pluses too.
But back in the 80s and 90s, margins were significantly higher. If you look at hardware, I recall selling hardware with 30% margin, if not more... even 80% on some items.
Yet what came with that was support, support, support. And when you sell 5 computers a month, instead of 500, well.. you need that margin to even have a store. Which you need, because no wide-scale internet.
On the software side, it was sort of the same. I remember paying $80 for some pieces of software, which would be like $200 today. You'd pay $1 on an app store for such software, but I'd also call the author if there was a bug. He'd send an update in the mail.
I guess my point is, in those days, it was fun to fix issues. The focus was more specific, there was time to ply the trade, to enjoy it, to have performant, elegant fixes.
Now, it's all "my boss is hassling me and another bug will somehow mean I have to work harder", which is .. well, sad.
High end enterprise products still come with support. That's literally what customers are paying for: a single throat to choke.
Exactly! The "pay a lot of money but get really good support" tier still exists just about everywhere. You just didn't do the first part.
That kind of attitude disgusts me. Like it's someone else's job to have a sense of accountability. They would not remain employed in my company.
When I developed software I would jump right on top of any bug reports immediately, and work until they were fixed. I was grateful to my customers for bringing them to my attention.
It is different when you have a billion customers, all with different setups. At that scale, you notice real defects through product telemetry, support ticket volume, or trusted channels. You receive a high volume of bug reports that are due to user confusion, misconfiguration, or misbehavior of other software on the device - where solving an issue for one customer doesn't result in improvements for the other billion. Triage, filtering, and winnowing are necessary here.
My guess it's just the emergent behavior that results when a company doesn't provide developers time to fix bugs.
If their week is already booked full just trying to keep up with the roadmap deadlines, a bug ticket feels like being tossed a 25lb weight when you're drowning.
You could say: "but have pride in your work!"
But if your company only values shipping, not fixing, that attitude doesn't make it through the first performance review.
What I've found to be most effective for program management is to set aside a maintenance team separate from the feature teams. The roadmap is then planned without counting anything for the maintenance team and they deal with bug tickets as they come in. Rotate the assignment periodically so that every developer has to occasionally spend a few months on the maintenance team.