Thursday 10 September 2015

ColdFusion Team: further erosion of trustI'm an arsehole

G'day:

Update 4:

I was completely wrong in what I said in this article, and I am not proud of myself as a result. I am leaving the article here as evidence of what a prick I can be. You should instead read this article: "Wrong".




This is a slightly catty article, I know. I'll keep it short though.

Update 1:

Perhaps you should read "Update 3" (below) before continuing though: you should be reading this with all the information and make your own decision.

Getting feedback from the Adobe ColdFusion Team - with the exception of Anit - is like getting blood out of a stone. Routinely one can ask them a question on the bug tracker (etc) and they'll simply ignore it. One might chase the issue up later, and they'll ignore it. Then perhaps one might forget about the issue until it catches one's self out again, and notice there's already a ticket for it, and Adobe have completely ignored it after the passage of a year or more, or they've closed it with a status of "QuickNoOneIsWatching/Closed". I'll follow these up to try to extract from them what the hell they think they're up to.

I did this yesterday, returning to an interesting ticket that Luis raised: "Closures cannot be declared outside of cfscript" (3648781). It was raised about two years ago, and Adobe's (via Rupesh) attempts at fobbing it off started a few months later, but faced with the application of facts and logic from the community to counter Rupesh's bullshit, smoke and mirrors, he finally conceded it warranted addressing, but he'd managed to spin the situation out long enough that it missed the window for CF11 so - in typical Adobe fashion - he was closing the ticket anyhow, deferring it to the next release (ColdFusion-Team-ese for "hopefully they'll just forget").

A coupla months ago the ColdFusion 12 pre-release started, so I started looking at old tickets which had been "Closed/CantBeArsed/HopeTheyForget", and remind Adobe that we're now in the next release cycle, so they could start re-evaluating these things. It's a stupid approach to having to work, but it's the way they do it. So be it:




Update 2:

I've just noticed there was a whole year in there, not a coupla months. My bad. I presume it was one of the ones I chased up recently. This does not detract from the main thrust of this.


And here it is a coupla months later, after complete radio silence from Adobe, I've nudged them again:


This is unsurprising. It usually takes one of these and then asking Anit for help before anyone there will look at the bug tracker.

But then this morning I note Rupesh has had his cage rattled, and comes back with this:


Update 3:

OK so Rupesh is calling shenanigans on this: see his comment in the comments below.

I think he's still being misleading, but it seems that it's not so clear cut as I was making it seem. In his favour he's posted an audit trail of the ticket, but... well... that does not reflect the reality of that ticket. It was closed y/day. Why the hell would I have commented if it was open, FFS.

I will leave it to you - the reader - to judge whoever needs judging on this. It's either an indictment of Rupesh, or an indictment of me. Your call.


The dodgy dodgy geezer! He'd gone and changed the status of the ticket, and was now going "what? What's up?" I'm picturing him with a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth look on his mug too.

I reflected my opinion of his actions along those lines too:




Fortunately I was not the only person who eyeballed that ticket yesterday, Sean had looked at the closed ticket yesterday too, and verified as much:


This is really really disappointing of Rupesh as he continues to indict his team with his actions.

They've got a client calling them out for being negligent with their communications, after having been work-shy in the first place, and his reaction to that is to lie about things and try to cover his arse.

What's worse (?) is that he also made a point of trying to cover his actions by not using the usual status-change mechanism which triggers an email to be sent to all issue participants. No email went out for that change. So this wasn't just a case of missing the status change and wondering what I was on about, it was a willful attempt to misrepresent the situation.

How is this a way to conduct one's self?

So why am I writing this? Well as a bit of a PSA that when dealing with the ColdFusion Team... not only does one need to get used to them being a bit shit when it comes to the way they deal with their clients, one also can't really trust them either. They're just well dodgy. I'm sorry to tar the entire team with this brush and I'm sure some of them are honest and diligent etc. But sorry: this is how you collectively present yourselves to your clients.

Do  really need to go to the lengths of screen-capping / recording the things they say? I'm already doing so with anything Rakshith says because he's demonstrated himself to not be shy about "reinterpreting the truth", and I guess I need to start doing with with Rupesh as well.

Very disappointing.

--
Adam