let's hope everything settles smoothly :)
(This was years ago, and i don't have the email exchange anymore, so i'm doing my best to describe it from memory)
I reported a bug I had debugged pretty heavily and believed was likely a bug in the appengine datastore (this was before it was publicly available, IIRC), with a fairly detailed repro recipe, etc.
(I was not on the appengine team, just building an app)
I had debugged all the client side code all the way down to the rpc to the datastore server and was positive there was nothing weird going on there at all.
Within a minute or two of me sending the email to the email alias , he replies with "This must be a bug in your code, that can't happen". He didn't even look at it (i looked at the logs)
I replied with "I agree it should be impossible, but if you could look at it for a second, i think you'll see that it's not and is actually happening. The code is very simple, etc".
He says "I don't have time to fix your code".
So i spend the time and reduce it to a simple, 20 line piece of completely obvious code (IIRC i believe it had no real code except to instantiate the class and store it in the datastore) with no dependencies.
and say "here, i took the time to try to make it as clear and obvious that this is really not a bug in the code, because there is no real code here"
He replied with something else abrasive and dismissive.
Then, about 20 minutes later, one of his teammates replies with basically, "oh shit, this is bad".
(Because what i had discovered turned out to have caused data loss that they couldn't automatically fix. The could get the data back from restores, but it wasn't clear what to do with it, you needed intervention from a user)
Honestly, it would have been better for him to not respond at all. (he was not the on-call team member at the time anyway)
We all have our bad days/times of course (i definitely did!), so i do hope he's found more inner peace than he had back then. But yeah.
I did observe that you first provided a "fairly detailed repro recipe", and then after he rebuffed you, you provided a "simple, 20 line piece of obvious code". What Guido should have done was ask you to make the extra effort to provide the latter case if the "recipe" you provided was in fact too much effort for him to look at, for something that didn't seem to be a bug to him. That is, he wanted you to "spend the time" as you said, and if he had more experience with this kind of thing perhaps he would have known to just ask for it rather than dismissing the whole thing.
What happens to me, at least, a lot, is I get bug reports that are like "here just unzip this 10M attachment, install theses libraries and datafiles and then watch the log output for the thing I spent five paragraphs not really describing". These are not coworkers or customers of mine, for whom I might be obligated to go through all those steps for, they are regular users who have downloaded my software for free (as they should), and likely saving their company thousands or even millions of person-hours of work by doing so. The thing I ask these people in return is that they A. report issues to me and B. do as much work as they can to help me fix the problem - I'm not a concierge, the help process is more of part of how the give and take of open source software is supposed to work between parties.
I encourage these people to please pass along an MCVE, e.g. the most succinct demonstration script possible, and quite often when I get the sense that they don't really have the experience to know what I'm looking for (despite my sending them the link to what an MCVE is), I will often read their verbal description, then write my own MCVE in about one minute that shows what they are asserting is not true, and then I paste that into the issue; I have a Python fragment script that I use as a starting point for writing 90% of these test cases. I ask them to please modify the MCVE to show the thing they are actually trying to do. That's how I get them to send me a succinct problem description that isn't a huge waste of my time.
I understand this is likely not at all what happened in your case as you were both at Google and I'm sure folks there are more sophisticated than this. I just had the thought based on how you had sent two versions of the issue.
FWIW: the detailed repro recipe was hermetic and single-binary (and guaranteed to work on his machine for various reasons), it just had more code than strictly necessary (It was still <500 lines, it was a very simple webapp).
The actual recipe was closer to "run this binary, click on new record button, click save, observe results in datastore".
I actually reduced it not because the recipe was too detailed, but to remove the argument that it was my code.
But everyone has their limits.
