[ldoughty]

Just to play devil's advocate... It can be hard to know that there's a problem if it doesn't get escalated to the right people.

I'm sure most devs have an experience where something is broken for weeks before you happen to overhear someone talking about the multi-step workaround for a 5 minute code fix.

I think the same kind of issue applies.. Support teams are encouraged to not escalate, if they do, it often goes to a higher level support (but not any developers/business people). They find a clever solution and that becomes the common practice. It's not until a big stink is made that the right people are aware of a possible problem, and perhaps only then investigate the scope of that problem, and realize it needs prioritization.

Of course, this doesn't answer why the support team didn't even read the email to see you're not asking for a password reset... But might be a contributing factor.

[Kye]

Real world example: Mastodon would toss out and stop updating home feeds to save resources after a period of inactivity.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5634

So people came back to empty timelines. Terrible UX, but until someone both experienced it and mentioned it, no one with code access realized how bad this was for returning users. Now there's a friendly message letting returning users know what's going on.

[lazyasciiart]

I once found out that an admin person was spending a couple minutes many times a day to open a user profile, find half a dozen different fields and copy them into a word doc template and then printing to a pdf that she emailed to the user. I added a button “generate pdf” for her and she was thrilled.