Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2020 10:38:45 -0800
From: donotreply@apple.com
To: jwz@jwz.org
Subject: Information about your feedback 5373417Hi Jamie,
Thank you for your feedback.
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Feedback ID 5373417, want $ACTIVE_TARGET read-only build setting 4431417
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Today in CADT, Apple Edition
I just received this email from Apple, in response to a bug that I reported against Xcode 2.2 in 2006. That's fourteen years.
Tags: computers, corporations, doomed, firstperson, linux, mac
8 Responses:
You can't leave us hanging like that! Did you submit the update? Need a status on this bug.
I'm gonna do that right away. Like maybe in 14 years.
I see Apple is catching up with the Ubuntu Bug Jam philosophy of just posting "Is this still an issue" and getting that sweet sweet klout for it.
CADT (17 years ago):
Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short.
In this house we click "previously" links.
The first two comments are worth the click.
I want to believe someone there has an incredibly dry sense of humor and wanted to somehow pay interest on their many, many earnestly-reported, unfixed bugs over the years.
But I suspect someone just noticed they hadn't flushed the triage queue in two decades.
Yup and it is pretty easy to guess how this went down. A new quality manager came on board and noticed the huge backlog. They then task one of their minions to take that backlog down to zero. The minion knows that he/she can’t go through the backlog one by one and decides to distribute the workload back to the bug reporters who must opt-in to refresh their request to prevent it defaulting to “closed”. They do this knowing fully that most of the old email addresses are defunct and those bugs will evaporate. Those who are reached have long since worked around the problem, maybe switching to a different vendor. They’re also not going to respond.
This is a grand tradition in Silicon Valley of “improving quality” by doing nothing to fix the SW but instead making the metrics appear better.