Turns out there was a known bug in Microsoft schannel that had yet to be patched and they'd wasted weeks of our effort by not searching their own bug tracker properly.

Then you assume, naively, that this means that they've recognised that there really is a product problem and will go off and fix it. However, then in turn the support tech needs to reproduce the the issue to the development team.

They invariably fail to do so for any number of reasons, such as: This only happens in my region, not others. Or the support tech's lab environment doesn't actually allow them to spin up the high-spec thing that's broken. Or whatever.

Then the ticket gets rejected with "can't reproduce" after you've reproduced the issue, with a recorded video and everything as evidence.

If you then navigate that gauntlet, the ticket is most typically rejected with "It is broken like that by design, closed."

When I developed software I would jump right on top of any bug reports immediately, and work until they were fixed. I was grateful to my customers for bringing them to my attention.

But back in the 80s and 90s, margins were significantly higher. If you look at hardware, I recall selling hardware with 30% margin, if not more... even 80% on some items.

Yet what came with that was support, support, support. And when you sell 5 computers a month, instead of 500, well.. you need that margin to even have a store. Which you need, because no wide-scale internet.

On the software side, it was sort of the same. I remember paying $80 for some pieces of software, which would be like $200 today. You'd pay $1 on an app store for such software, but I'd also call the author if there was a bug. He'd send an update in the mail.

I guess my point is, in those days, it was fun to fix issues. The focus was more specific, there was time to ply the trade, to enjoy it, to have performant, elegant fixes.

Now, it's all "my boss is hassling me and another bug will somehow mean I have to work harder", which is .. well, sad.