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Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied.
(go.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Years ago, I was de facto tech lead on a project. Every time a weird issue came up with the closed-system third-party development environment we were using, it fell to me to figure out what was causing it and file a bug report. It took time to figure out what was going on, narrow down the possibilities, get it to reliably reproduce, then word the bug report so that it was clear what the issue was - and this was on top of my regular duties.
I remember figuring out that if your SQL statement was 683 characters long, you were fine, but if it was any longer than that, the program would crash. I filed a bug report saying exactly that and giving the error message that got generated.
They came back and said they didn't understand the bug report or how to reproduce it. I said, "Write a 683-character SQL statement. The program will run. Add one random space-character anywhere; the program will crash." As far as I was concerned, this wasn't my problem, and I was fully tired of finding and reporting bugs on their shitty platform (our customer had locked us into it).
They came whining back, "Oh, but that's soooo haaarddd ... " I'm like, "It's not. Just write SELECT X, X, X [etc] until you have 683 characters," (especially true because I had no idea what their database structure looked like) but they kept whining. Eventually they just came straight-out and said, "We need you to send us the entire failing module [because we can't be arsed to do our own job, tyvm]."
My manager talked me down from the email I wanted to send back and told me to just strip everything else out. Which I did, but it took me like a day and a half to strip it back to something that had enough to reproduce the error without giving things away. I sent them the 683-character version and said, "Run this. Then add a random space anywhere in the SQL statement and it'll die. This is your job and you're not even my company, you figure it out from here."
Then they had the nerve to come whining back, "Oh, we don't understand what to add to the SQL statement or whe-ere. Pweas pweas pweas send us a non-working copy as well!" I'm like, ADD. A. SPACE. ANYWHERE." We went through a couple rounds of that, then my manager told me to add the space and send it to them so they (the people who developed this entire platform we were working on) could figure out the issue.
Steaming, I sent the second file. Since I had now done their entire diagnose-and-reproduce job for them, they graciously consented to open up a bug report.
We found multiple bugs like this. If you press the Save button it works fine but if you use Ctl-S it sometimes crashed [why are you using two separate Save routines?!?!]. They didn't left-pad the time call to the operating system (which they said they did), so any program run before 10am had a chance of randomly crashing - that kind of thing. Probably half my overtime was figuring out their bugs so my developers could actually write code.
ISTG, after all the repeated time, stress and effort their shitty product cost me, if they'd insisted "Oh, we can't do anything without a video showing us how to do our effing job" - well, they'd have been lucky to get a 15-minute troll video because I'd've vented two years of anger and frustration with their product and their customer "support" into that video.
I've had an antagonistic relationship with a vendor like this, it's awful. In my case the vendor was supposed to be a fast moving tech startup - the only thing that moved fast there was the revolving door of engineering talent coming and going.
Even worse, my boss had been convinced by their founder that he had all this pull with the company, and since the company was super cool, that made him super cool, and I dunno if you've ever tried to criticize something that has made a middle aged nerd feel cool for the first time in his life, but let's just say it was not a fruitful endeavor.
The number of things I effectively fixed for them via email, the abominations I had to construct to work around the things they refused or failed to fix...bad times.
Oh god, the comments I put in the code, explaining what I was doing and why, and how to test that the product had been fixed before changing my code, because I just knew some junior codebro was going to come in and think, "I should clean this code up!" and they'd have no idea why it wasn't working anymore ....
Thank you for your comments.
Nothing irritates me more than walls of code without any comments and the "cOdE sHoUld bE sElf-DoCuMenTiNg" attitude. No, it's impossible to describe complex industry-specific processes by naming your variables and functions nicely.
That's horrendous.
My company supports businesses where any issue that prevents them from completing a task could cost them millions if their operations need to stop. We get super vague bug reports, yet we usually turn around a fix in a day or two.
I just don't understand how a company could be so blasé about a clear bug report that they're willing to go back and forth like that.
"vendor lockin"
once a company has you by the balls, they will fire everyone competent and hire interns for maintence and support
Just askin', this company wasn't called something like Microstrategy, no?
It rhymed with Smoracle. Which is really ironic because you'd think that's the ONE company that would (a) understand how to write a SQL statement, and (b) get really effing concerned when a simple database query broke their product.
It seems from the description that there's the length of the request there stored in 11 bits, hell knows why, so max of 2046 (682*3, that's 683*3 = 2049 if starting with 1), and one symbol takes an increment of 3, hell knows why.
That's, ahem, yes, a pretty gross mistake for such rhyming companies, the kind only I am allowed to make.
Oh, cool! I never figured out why they had the 683/684-character limit thing, so it's cool beans to you - thank you!
They ended up "fixing" the problem by increasing the character limit to 2048, which was nice.
Oracle doesn't know how to write software. Only contracts and lawsuits.