Cassini will enter orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. It will release a piggybacked probe, Huygens, which will descend through Titan's atmosphere on Jan. 14, 2005.
OK, so how come we can't get a train or bus to arrive in time? It's a much shorter distance and scaled down, we should be able to get millisecond accuracy across town. Do we need rocket engineers designing buses and astronauts driving them?
I have worked three years in a small-grew-to-medium-sized software development company as webmaster/support tech (all levels)/documentalist/trainer (trained tech support staff, both in Sweden and our US subsidiary) and a year and a half in a medium-sized software development company as webmaster/documentalist and these are my experiences:
Get or make a good trouble-report database. We rolled our own in Notes. Make sure there are no nook and crannies where troublesome customers/problems can fall in and stay hidden. You need the ability to select different views - measure response-times, see if any of the employees are lagging behind and why, etc.
Treat your people good. This is a good idea for several reasons but it is also difficult for a number of reasons. You need to (as tech support group leader) stand by your crew when they get attacked, both from customers and from management. Do not let any shit pass you, either way. This is important. You take the blame and if needed, you can dish out your own, later - but you can not ever let any of that pass you by unfiltered. You need to be in the loop to keep on top and you need your troops' confidence in you or they will not do a good job for you. You are their platoon sergeant. Once in a while, take them out for a meal or something (I have treated my US team on a night at a Japanese Steakhouse and presented them with Apollo 11 mission patches to build team spirit, from my own money - not expensed and I let that fact leak out to them discreetly;-).
Treat bad customers good, too. Some customers will scream and rant at the firstline people because they think this will get them escalated to second. Some customers will do it because they are assholes. This is one of the most difficult problems I have encountered and I have no quick fix except standing by your people and let them escalate these customers directly to you. Talk to the customer about their behaviour but do not get into a shouting match or let your people do it either. Try to keep the customer on the phone while you give them a kind and well-meaning lecture about how their behaviour might get them less support than they would being kind and try to make sure they understand that a support contract gives them the right to obtain technical support for a product, it does not give them a right to call up and abuse tect support staff. Most customers will respond favourably to this, but it's a minefield.
I had one frontline girl who would ignite fairly quickly when one of these customers called. My super wanted to sack her or pull her off tech support completely, but I like to think I got her trained, at the cost of taking one of her customers over completely, personally (this was the t-shirt customer mentioned below, BTW. Hi, Jodi!;-). One could also have frontliners mention that all calls are recorded - this seems to cool most of them down.
Treat your customers good. This sounds like a no-brainer but it's surprisingly often that techs talk crap about customers when they think they've muted them.:-) Do not encourage that. Encourage empathy and foster a culture of siding with the customers against the company. Or, at least make it SEEM so. Bond with them. They will love you, one and all. I have gotten t-shirts and other sundry gifts sent to me from happy customers, just because I listened and I made my people listen to them. Which brings me to the next point:
Listen to your customers. Many customers do not primarily need to get their problem fixed, the need a sympathetic ear - someone that listens to them. Consultants on site may need someone to blame and Sysadmins may want a human to talk to for a bit - so give it to them. It's their dime.
And, like someone else mentioned - integrate tech support, documentation, QA and training. In my case, I worked in all of them and while I formally was employed as webmaster, I soon wound up running the documentation and training team and we all did scheduled tech support - even the developers. This was invaluable for feedback into the training, website and documentation, not to mention that we could get better response from the developers if we could prove that we could cut down on their tech support duties if we got them to fix their software and document it better. Make the developers truly responsible.
Tech support isn't about technology, it's about psychology.
It's not about software and hardware, it's about people.
I am now a private consultant and do give courses and training seminars in this area (among others) - contact me if you need me.
Re:Flat universe
on
One of Many
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Great - and we thought the flat earthers were bad enough...
I did something like that once. Sendit, a company I was working for, was getting bought by Microsoft and as the webmaster I got prior notice (like two hours before the meeting when they were going to announce it) and a copy of the press release which I put up on the website, but with no link to it. I figured I'd add the link as soon as it was supposed to go live and save a minute. Well, some smartass developer figured out that I had used the standard date format on the html file and all hell broke loose. I quickly changed the file to read Tokyo Happy Prawn Company[1] instead of Microsoft and fudged the price, but the damage was done.
The 'softies were already antsy since when they called us all in for 'an important meeting', I had replied "Oh, is Bill finally buying us?" and this episode basically put them over the hill.
I quit on that day. Not because of this incident, but because I didn't want to work for Sauron.
[1] That was one of the more imaginative company names suggested for the buy-out of Commodore, back in the day. THPC and Barney the Dinosaur.:-)
I believe it was in the book Lord of the Files (William Golding would spin in his grave if he knew how many schoolkids misspell HIS book) that I read about a mad scientist building the game of Defender using cows milling through an intricate system of pens and gates spread out over several acres of farmland. The gates were wired and the inventor had an array of light bulbs as the display. You have a friend in the business, indeed.:-)
Ohh, I just found another quote from the book that I once used in a software manual:
Prestel screen-dump, ASCII string,
Punched tape reader, Token Ring,
Matrix output, raster scan,
Printer sharing via LAN,
Transputer network, thirty mips,
Configured in the moonís eclipse.
ROM-based firmware, network nodes,
User-friendly input modes,
Duplex transfer, RISC machine,
Jump to user subroutine,
Write it to a backup file,
Press return, compile, compile!
Ah, that explains it. But you're wrong - the worm cares about the innards of the apple. And Woz, of course.;-)
And, if you want to get picky, the surface representation in 3D does care, you need to define the curvature somehow and you can't do that in 2D - without that, it's just another plane. *ponders* Nah, I don't want to get picky. Let's leave it.:-)
Exqueeze moi? That one made me do a double-take. Or maybe those two made me do a triple-take, I'm not sure... Maybe if you look at a coloured circle using red-green glasses?
Archimedes invented the screw pump while taking a bath
(Note to reader: I'll ignore the obvious troll potential in that statement and go for the semi-serious approach that tapers out at the end) IIRC, he noticed the displacement of a fluid when a body is submerged in it. This lead to displacement of a goldsmith's head since it provided him with a method to test the density (and hence deduce the proportions of the different metals) of a newly manufactured golden crown for the King (whose name I have conveniently forgotten, let's hope no one knows who George Bush was two thousand years from now, but everyone has heard of Stephen Hawking).
Little known conjecture: If Alexander Graham Bell had been alive at the time, Archie would have forgotten the whole thing when he had to climb out of the bath to answer the phone. Let's decapitate telemarketers!
Because I have a zillion e-mail messages neatly stored in Mozilla Mail right now and it's no point in switching browser if I still run a mailer with a browser attached.:-)
Re:Interaction, not Merging
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The Microsoft approach you mention is a bit misleading - all of those apps use the same basic functionality that's built into the OS kernel - one large, stinking glob of code. What you percieve as different apps is little more than different front-ends for the API/DLL-hell that's Windows. But, they still need each other - try to uninstall OE but keep IE and Messenger. Or completely replace OE with the full Outbreak from Office. The dependencies are just hidden from plain view.
That said, I think Mozilla does leave too big a footprint. I remember back in the Good Old Days you could get Netscape Navigator and Communicator as separate packages. I'd actually like a lean Mozilla browser and a separate Mozilla mail app. No webpage creation, no messenger, no chat/irc. I'll definitely keep an eye on Phoenix.
Eventually somebody will craft a graphical installer for Gentoo and maybe its popularity will increase.
Gentoo has a graphical installer. Just print the install docs as graphics instead of truetype/postscript fonts and you're set.;-) No, but semi-seriously, it doesn't get much more graphic than this. The install script is in plain-text, the interpreter is all done in wetware and you'll get a wonderful learning experience at a bargain price. Image what a two-day crash course in Installing Windows XP would cost at an e-learning center! With Gentoo, you get the course and get to keep the software - for free! You can't beat that.
Now, I have never actually used kemerge, but I can guess what it does. I have used Webmin's emerge front-end and it works just fine for me. I have installed Gentoo on *counts on fingers* four P133-class machines [1] (firewalls), one PIII 550 server plus two Athlon 1800+ workstations. I used to run Red Hat 7.1 on the lot (still do on the main server, I have nightmares about the Switch) but it was just too painful to keep them updated. Just the other day I tried to update sendmail on the remaining RH box so I could run a milter for SpamAssassin, but after the first smell of sulphur from RPM dependency hell I backed out and vowed to go Gentoo on that server too, ASAP.
One of the things I love about Gentoo (well, apart from the support in the forums (Hi, Kurt!;-), portage, the init system, the docs, portage, the learning experience, emerge, the power I feel and the speed I get in some apps) is the knowledge that nothing gets added to my system that I didn't have a very good chance of reviewing and approving beforehand. emerge --pretend samba would tell me exactly what other packages samba depends upon - version numbers, the lot. A standard install does not include a telnet demon. Heck, it doesn't even have traceroute! Red Hat 7.1 bloated my servers bigtime and I still wonder if I missed killing a service somewhere...
[1] I cheated.:-) For the first two I stuck their hard drives in a cradle, booted my Athlon 1800+ workstation off the installation CD and did the compile from that, more recently I just do it in VMWare and move the drives back to the firewall box when I'm done. This is easy to do because of Gentoo's Way: I specify compiler options in one file (/etc/make.conf) and if I say i586 then my Athlon will happily compile and optimize the code for a Pentium-class processor.
Gentoo makes your computer happy. So make your computer happy today - try Gentoo. There's even an install CD with UT 2003 demo on it. Go ahead and download it, you know you want to.:-)
It is very easy to do and it's even a commercial service with many mobile phone operators. I have signed up with Friendfinder and agreed that a few of my friends can have access to my location information - by sending a simple SMS they get charged around 50c and get a reply with my current location. In the same way, I can see where they are - or rather, where their phones are. They do not have to make calls, having the phone switched on is sufficient.
Oh, and this article has nothing to do with that. It's about using the radio waves emitted by the cell phone towers as a form of radar - detecting how the radio energy bounces back from buildings, submarine periscopes, airplanes and people with tinfoil hats. You should read it, it's actually very interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that I never let minor facts stand in the way of a perfectly good argument. Nyah and the pox on you, good Sir!
It's the perfect game! No customers left alive to bother the developers for upgrades!
OK, so how come we can't get a train or bus to arrive in time? It's a much shorter distance and scaled down, we should be able to get millisecond accuracy across town. Do we need rocket engineers designing buses and astronauts driving them?
Get or make a good trouble-report database. We rolled our own in Notes. Make sure there are no nook and crannies where troublesome customers/problems can fall in and stay hidden. You need the ability to select different views - measure response-times, see if any of the employees are lagging behind and why, etc.
Treat your people good. This is a good idea for several reasons but it is also difficult for a number of reasons. You need to (as tech support group leader) stand by your crew when they get attacked, both from customers and from management. Do not let any shit pass you, either way. This is important. You take the blame and if needed, you can dish out your own, later - but you can not ever let any of that pass you by unfiltered. You need to be in the loop to keep on top and you need your troops' confidence in you or they will not do a good job for you. You are their platoon sergeant. Once in a while, take them out for a meal or something (I have treated my US team on a night at a Japanese Steakhouse and presented them with Apollo 11 mission patches to build team spirit, from my own money - not expensed and I let that fact leak out to them discreetly ;-).
Treat bad customers good, too. Some customers will scream and rant at the firstline people because they think this will get them escalated to second. Some customers will do it because they are assholes. This is one of the most difficult problems I have encountered and I have no quick fix except standing by your people and let them escalate these customers directly to you. Talk to the customer about their behaviour but do not get into a shouting match or let your people do it either. Try to keep the customer on the phone while you give them a kind and well-meaning lecture about how their behaviour might get them less support than they would being kind and try to make sure they understand that a support contract gives them the right to obtain technical support for a product, it does not give them a right to call up and abuse tect support staff. Most customers will respond favourably to this, but it's a minefield.
I had one frontline girl who would ignite fairly quickly when one of these customers called. My super wanted to sack her or pull her off tech support completely, but I like to think I got her trained, at the cost of taking one of her customers over completely, personally (this was the t-shirt customer mentioned below, BTW. Hi, Jodi! ;-). One could also have frontliners mention that all calls are recorded - this seems to cool most of them down.
Treat your customers good. This sounds like a no-brainer but it's surprisingly often that techs talk crap about customers when they think they've muted them. :-) Do not encourage that. Encourage empathy and foster a culture of siding with the customers against the company. Or, at least make it SEEM so. Bond with them. They will love you, one and all. I have gotten t-shirts and other sundry gifts sent to me from happy customers, just because I listened and I made my people listen to them. Which brings me to the next point:
Listen to your customers. Many customers do not primarily need to get their problem fixed, the need a sympathetic ear - someone that listens to them. Consultants on site may need someone to blame and Sysadmins may want a human to talk to for a bit - so give it to them. It's their dime.
And, like someone else mentioned - integrate tech support, documentation, QA and training. In my case, I worked in all of them and while I formally was employed as webmaster, I soon wound up running the documentation and training team and we all did scheduled tech support - even the developers. This was invaluable for feedback into the training, website and documentation, not to mention that we could get better response from the developers if we could prove that we could cut down on their tech support duties if we got them to fix their software and document it better. Make the developers truly responsible.
Tech support isn't about technology, it's about psychology.
It's not about software and hardware, it's about people.
I am now a private consultant and do give courses and training seminars in this area (among others) - contact me if you need me.
Great - and we thought the flat earthers were bad enough...
The 'softies were already antsy since when they called us all in for 'an important meeting', I had replied "Oh, is Bill finally buying us?" and this episode basically put them over the hill.
I quit on that day. Not because of this incident, but because I didn't want to work for Sauron.
[1] That was one of the more imaginative company names suggested for the buy-out of Commodore, back in the day. THPC and Barney the Dinosaur. :-)
Careful now, you'll give them poll ideas. :-)
I want a cooler the size of Delaware. (Obligatory Snow Crash reference)
No, there's at least three of us now. :-)
Ohh, I just found another quote from the book that I once used in a software manual:
- Ray Girvan and Steve JonesYes, Yoda. :-) Remember that, I will.
Lead to what? Incomplete sentences?
Visio was just recently bought by M$, they obviously haven't had time to corrupt the file format yet.
And, if you want to get picky, the surface representation in 3D does care, you need to define the curvature somehow and you can't do that in 2D - without that, it's just another plane. *ponders* Nah, I don't want to get picky. Let's leave it. :-)
Exqueeze moi? That one made me do a double-take. Or maybe those two made me do a triple-take, I'm not sure... Maybe if you look at a coloured circle using red-green glasses?
(Note to reader: I'll ignore the obvious troll potential in that statement and go for the semi-serious approach that tapers out at the end) IIRC, he noticed the displacement of a fluid when a body is submerged in it. This lead to displacement of a goldsmith's head since it provided him with a method to test the density (and hence deduce the proportions of the different metals) of a newly manufactured golden crown for the King (whose name I have conveniently forgotten, let's hope no one knows who George Bush was two thousand years from now, but everyone has heard of Stephen Hawking).
Little known conjecture: If Alexander Graham Bell had been alive at the time, Archie would have forgotten the whole thing when he had to climb out of the bath to answer the phone. Let's decapitate telemarketers!
Install Gentoo Linux. :-)
But the cooling vents would have to be the size of Delaware. :-)
Because I have a zillion e-mail messages neatly stored in Mozilla Mail right now and it's no point in switching browser if I still run a mailer with a browser attached. :-)
That said, I think Mozilla does leave too big a footprint. I remember back in the Good Old Days you could get Netscape Navigator and Communicator as separate packages. I'd actually like a lean Mozilla browser and a separate Mozilla mail app. No webpage creation, no messenger, no chat/irc. I'll definitely keep an eye on Phoenix.
Talk to me, Goose!
we do. It's called gcc 3.2. (.Or maybe it's GNU/gcc 3.2 RMS Edition.)
Gentoo has a graphical installer. Just print the install docs as graphics instead of truetype/postscript fonts and you're set. ;-) No, but semi-seriously, it doesn't get much more graphic than this. The install script is in plain-text, the interpreter is all done in wetware and you'll get a wonderful learning experience at a bargain price. Image what a two-day crash course in Installing Windows XP would cost at an e-learning center! With Gentoo, you get the course and get to keep the software - for free! You can't beat that.
Now, I have never actually used kemerge, but I can guess what it does. I have used Webmin's emerge front-end and it works just fine for me. I have installed Gentoo on *counts on fingers* four P133-class machines [1] (firewalls), one PIII 550 server plus two Athlon 1800+ workstations. I used to run Red Hat 7.1 on the lot (still do on the main server, I have nightmares about the Switch) but it was just too painful to keep them updated. Just the other day I tried to update sendmail on the remaining RH box so I could run a milter for SpamAssassin, but after the first smell of sulphur from RPM dependency hell I backed out and vowed to go Gentoo on that server too, ASAP.
One of the things I love about Gentoo (well, apart from the support in the forums (Hi, Kurt! ;-), portage, the init system, the docs, portage, the learning experience, emerge, the power I feel and the speed I get in some apps) is the knowledge that nothing gets added to my system that I didn't have a very good chance of reviewing and approving beforehand. emerge --pretend samba would tell me exactly what other packages samba depends upon - version numbers, the lot. A standard install does not include a telnet demon. Heck, it doesn't even have traceroute! Red Hat 7.1 bloated my servers bigtime and I still wonder if I missed killing a service somewhere...
[1] I cheated. :-) For the first two I stuck their hard drives in a cradle, booted my Athlon 1800+ workstation off the installation CD and did the compile from that, more recently I just do it in VMWare and move the drives back to the firewall box when I'm done. This is easy to do because of Gentoo's Way: I specify compiler options in one file (/etc/make.conf) and if I say i586 then my Athlon will happily compile and optimize the code for a Pentium-class processor.
Gentoo makes your computer happy. So make your computer happy today - try Gentoo. There's even an install CD with UT 2003 demo on it. Go ahead and download it, you know you want to. :-)
That's sooo lo-tek. :-)
Oh, and this article has nothing to do with that. It's about using the radio waves emitted by the cell phone towers as a form of radar - detecting how the radio energy bounces back from buildings, submarine periscopes, airplanes and people with tinfoil hats. You should read it, it's actually very interesting.