[busterarm]

Not always. One of the software/hardware architects at D.E. Shaw Research (with a Ph.D. from MIT) was _legendary_ among our support team for filing and expecting followup on scores of internal support tickets for minor and often non-reproducible issues like the behavior of his laptop touchpad buttons or weird one-off website behavior. He filed tickets for everything and almost always for things we couldn't do anything about.

I'll never forget his name for that reason alone. He was, and I imagine still is, a serious drain on the support staff.

Totally brilliant though.

[dwidget]

He probably just figures it's delegating minor roadblocks so he can get to the 'important stuff'. If I could get a whole team dedicated to smoothing the highway in front of me of every little thing I probably would stop differentiating what was a pebble vs a tack. If he's the source of enough funding to pay for more than all of the man hours then it's more or less justified even if frustrating/frivolous. He's a cog and tripping up the workflow costs money.

Idk, I've seen a lot of dev guys try a lot of fruitless troubleshooting on systems when it would have been better to blow away the entire install and load up only necessary components...the troubleshooting cost a lot more because of the disparity in their paycheck and the revenue they brought in vs. the IT departments. The IT department should want calls since it reduces the disparity in earned department revenue, better showing the value of IT staff. Unless there isn't interdepartment accounting, in which case 'screw those time wasters, lol'.

[busterarm]

I see and considered the exact argument brought up, but he also wasn't unaware of the fact that we had an entire 1200-person staff to support on 4 continents. He filed at least three new support tickets like this _per day_.

His group was also the company's moonshot offshoot project -- not bringing in the bread and butter of the business.