How much are these customers paying for support to have Raymond Chen on first level support to debug their batch files?
We may imagine the CEO of a large company in his throne room, only reachable through his servant and only for matters of utmost importance, billion dollar contracts and all that. And sure, there is that, but not just that.
You may occasionally find out that the guy who a replaced a defective Ethernet cable on the intern's computer was that CEO. Or the lead developer of a AAA game patiently explaining some basic functionality to a random gamer. A CTO may pick up a random support call. So Raymond Chen debugging an "obvious" problem in a .bat script, not at all surprising to me.
It has already happened to me that on a support call where I expect some underpaid grunt, find that the guy is really good, patient and friendly, only to end up discovering that I just talked to the one who built the whole thing. Makes my day when it happens.
It think that if I was some kind of VIP top level whatever, I would cherish these moments. Simple things, genuine human contact, away from the big responsibilities tied to my position. And even from a professional perspective, getting a feel for what happens down there is important.
It wouldn't surprise me if he's periodically snooping the lowest level support queues from time to time to understand what kinds of issues customers face, where the pain points are, etc, etc.
It's like Patreon, accessible to staff first
Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?
Or maybe he was on a project working directly with the client already, so this was just part of whatever he was working on.
some parts are better than others, but god is it a quest to find anything in there.
On something like Unix, I suspect this would be easy to figure out since programs typically dump diagnostic information to the terminal. On Windows, this would likely be thing learned through prior experience (especially since it would depend upon the program being launched).
I'd be very, very surprised if MS had Raymond motherfuckin' Chen looking at support queues in 2026.
In an interview he said the backlog has varied from 3 to 18 months. Pretty negligible in terms of his career advancement. This isn't something he wrote ages ago.
I'm sorry but why would that bother you? Is my experience not valid any longer?
My point was: it is not at all surprising that a lvl 70 was poking through active support tickets because many of us did the same thing. I retired at Chen's level btw.
I don't know how Chen discovered this issue of course but it could have been exactly how I described it.
What? Huh? I have no idea what you think I meant but it's not what I meant.
I'm making a simple point: His backlog is not the reason he's talking about a ticket like this in 2026.
Either he took this ticket this year-ish, or he wrote this year-ish about something that happened long before. It is not the case that he wrote this post years and years ago and it was sitting in the backlog for that long.
That’s a rare privilege!