[yetihehe]

> fairly standard, and easy to follow--like the manual for putting together a piece of furniture.

And people still have problems following that instructions. We gave a lot of instructions, but some people just don't read them. Or can't understand and follow them. Example from this week:

Yeah, main support guy for our client is on holidays this week and only a girl from sales is available and she doesn't know why our device doesn't work, she tried resetting her phone wifi but still can't pair our zigbee smart hub connected with usb modem stick (problem: no one told her she needs to message us to actually activate sim card before installing device for end client).

Yes, you can solve this one problem, but there are many more we didn't see yet. Consumer support does not scale and you can't write tests for something you don't know will be a problem.

[titzer]

> no one told her she needs to message us

Did you have that written down somewhere? In instructions, which was my point.

Sorry for the snark, but I think "no one knows how to do anything" coupled with "Oh, the idiot didn't know to discombulate the canooter valve before inserting into the tinklerater--it's so obvious we didn't write it down" supports the point I'm making.

[yetihehe]

This was custom configuration process tailored specifically for that one client and it was written in a detailed instruction with each step tested and with screenshots. Apparently that instruction was not distributed internally at our client office. So mere existence of instructions is not often enough, you will still get very confusing calls about how to attach toaster to 36V to charge a wallet (when you did not send any toasters or wallets and client just wants your premade pizza).

[titzer]

So yes I sympathize that people didn't read the instructions, but I feel that that is partly out of habit that said instructions don't exist. We could work towards a better status quo where the configuration steps are simple, easy to follow, written out, and it's standard practice to just do them and they work.

The IT world seems to be an endless swamp of special cases and things breaking deep in the stack that require very specific, arcane skills from unwritten textbooks.