Re: Why does oracle support suck so much?

Netcomrade wrote:

>Over the years I have learned to rely less and less on oracle support,
>because quite often you get someone who is either incompetent or
>thick-headed.

I don't think this has changed much overall. There are times when they bring a whole group of newbies online, but I think even then the problems are more with customer relations and dividing up the workload correctly than incompetency.
There have been times when I've opened calls for two quite different issues, and one has hit the right person in the right group, and the other some Elbonian.

>"It's impossible for us to give you an estimate on when your backport
>patch will be ready, since we have no control over it. It's in the
>development 'queue', and it updates daily. It's the nature of software
>business to have such uncertainty"

Frankly, I consider this an honest answer. I would much rather they be careful with the backports, as with all patches, in fact, I wish they would do more final QA before releasing stuff that obviously doesn't work.

I'm pretty sure that beating on developers doesn't help productivity much. Escalation means handling higher management of the _customer_ - right?

Development needs to be insulated even from customer support. There needs to be communication between the two, getting the balance right is hard (read expensive). Considering the volume and variety of support, I think they do a pretty good job, and especially like that they let us see metalink, such as it is.

That said, your job ownership issue sounds like someone just didn't do a very good job. The "give some answer and hope they go away" crap. It _is_ tough to replicate some scalability issues (IIRC your problem).

jg

-- 
@home.com is bogus.
http://www.misternicehands.com/