• @EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml
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      811 months ago

      Remember how aggressive he was on the phone to support staff with the manufacturing requiring their first-party hub for updates (they never claimed to support home assistants in the first place)?

      That’s where showed his face and lost it.

      • @Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world
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        311 months ago

        I think that is generally a bad example to use.

        Linus was a dick to that CSR, no arguments there. But that is going to be overshadowed because posting your public firmware really should be something manufacturers do. It is not secret sauce and can be extracted if someone cares enough to do so with ST or the apple one or whatever. It is just preventing people from using open source tools like HA.

        Having done a year or so as a CSR back in undergrad: It fucking sucks. Everyone is shitty to you. “Killing them with kindness” gets you a LONG way. That said, there is also a time when the CSR explicitly cannot help you. That is when you need to make sure you get flagged as “irate”. The trick I use (that I learned from some of the more pleasant calls) is to repeatedly say “Look, I apologize. I know this is not your fault and I am sorry for taking this out on you. I am genuinely mad at your company but you don’t make those policy decisions”. Let out enough anger to make it clear you need to be escalated or retagged but apologize to the poor sod who is dealing with it.

        • @EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml
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          111 months ago

          Might be a bad example but that stuck to me: Under no circumstance, you should talk like this to customer service. Always remember that the other end is a human and being rude makes it hard to offer a solution.

          .

          How do I deal with support? Start nicely (with good companies that’s all you need) and slowly provide hints they screwed up allowing them to keep face as well as being the one offering it instead of reacting to the demand. If they don’t understand: tell them. The last resort is the blacklist (company, date, reason) paired with DNS blocking (in case I forget about it).

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          Want an example of a blacklisted company? Asus.

          They don’t have any technical support unless you are an influencer or some big shot buying frequently truckloads of products. I might be able to get somewhere by being a dick but do I always want to push hard to escalate it?

          Just call it a day (aka. scrap those products) and buy Asrock. This was definitely a quality-of-life improvement.

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          Btw. Extracting firmware can be difficult. Nordic had a horrific bug in the NRF52, WCH has a bug in the CH552 allowing to out the firmware by software. For ST STM32F it’s complicated. They have a design flaw but exploding it requires decapping the MCU and knowing in which area of the die the readout protection bit is located. Haven’t checked if they fixed it with the newer G, U and MP series.