Overselling myself?

[elfs]

Is it overselling myself to tell the customer service drone, "Look, when a guy who helped write the Linux kernel can't figure out what's wrong with his Linux-based Android phone, something is wrong with the phone?"

I mean, in the very long list of Linux contributors, my contribution is five lines of support code for the joystick driver, lines I know aren't in the Android phone (because there's no "Microsoft Sidewinder Flight Joystick gameport version without Force Feedback" for it) But that counts, doesn't it?

Comments

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

Hrm, the internal support number, or the external one?

For the internal one... if they were actually any good (Competent with DB2 and competent in letting management know), they'd immediately be placed on an external contract with IGS, or else shoved to a programming job for a high margin bit of enterprise software that uses DB2.

For the external one... if they were actually any good, they'd be looking up salaries at the green dollar customers and looking at how to schmooze their way into working for one of those.

Granted, if your department runs a different image than the rest of the corporation and it's harder for members of that department to reinstall with the department image than the corporate image... You have far bigger problems than crap answers from DB2 support.

P.S.
In the past external support had L1 essentially fielded by a different company and the compensation for that company amounted to it was in their best interests to cause as many new problems as possible.

[urox.livejournal.com]

Internal IBM HELP number. It was outsourced. They were following a computer decision tree. We never got bumped to someone higher. We started asking where they were located to gain evidence for management that we needed a different "source".

The problem which got the most "reinstall" answers was for Lotus Notes. *I* was a developer for DB2 and doubled as L3. ;) As far as I understood, my site had its own image separate from the global installer, but we had nothing to reinstall that specific image from without re-imaging the whole disk.

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

Not that it matters, but outsourced, or offshored?
Offshoring did enough damage... and it was embarrassing that when folks actually became competent in an offshored location like Sao Paolo, Brazil, they could make more money working in Academia than at IBM.

[urox.livejournal.com]

Offshored. Sorry. Mistyped earlier.