Alright, calm down. I mean this kindly, but passive-aggressive complaints are not going to enthuse CircleCI staff to tend immediately to your specific requirement. Spend time stroking the happy cat instead.
Indeed there are, but I think you meant âthreadsâ.
On a wider note - and I donât mean you specifically here - I have several times on this board seen rather bitter and unpleasant commentary directed towards Circle for not having feature X, or not having commented about it sufficiently to satisfy the commenter. I wonder whether some folks making the harshest complaints have not worked in a busy, commercial software environment. I suspect furthermore than some of the moaners are looking to use the free tier anyway, and they forget that engineering time is pretty expensive, and needs to be used carefully.
Letâs remember that employees are people too, and for those of us who are software engineers, letâs remember the last time that a hostile or poorly-worded customer complaint ruined our day.
Balancing every customer desire and getting stuff done is really hard, and inevitably some folks will be disappointed. The trick is trying to satisfy enough customers in order to pay staff and keep the lights on.
I completely agree with you regarding the harsh commentary in places like this. It doesnât help anyone and may ruin someone elseâs day. However, I am not sure where in my short text you saw passive-aggressiveness or the fact that I expect you to cater to my specific needs. All I wrote was that I feel frustrated when I see posts that are almost two years old and the only valuable answer by CircleCI employees is âWe donât have this feature right now, we will at some point.â
I acknowledge that as a perfectly fair point, which perhaps underscores how unreliable communication is in transmitting intent and tone! For what itâs worth, I acknowledge that my interpretation could be at fault, and âproving itâ is probably going to be a foolâs errand - we interpret things as we interpret them, and there is probably more unreliable emotional alchemy that goes into that process than science.
If I had to try to pinpoint the problem, Iâd say that - to some degree at least - we are not our emotional condition. Thus, if I say to someone that âI am angry at you and thatâs your faultâ, then in the ways such an accusation is codified, it can be hard to work out that perhaps the best response is that I need to achieve better control of my anger.
Of course, some anger is justified, and sometimes complaints are too. However, one solution for a complainant is to work out what can be said to achieve the desired end goal. For example, in this case, something like âWould a detailed use-case doc help CircleCI determine if this would be a popular feature?â That would be more likely to elicit employee replies. Perhaps a private email would be better too, with stuff like âI know you guys have a lot of competing demands, but I think this feature would not be too hard to achieve, if it was done in way Xâ.
Finally (and apols for the broad off-topic!), I think the theme of how we communicate with each other is very interesting in the context of (future) commercial relationships. The economic system we work within is broadly coercive: if I pay money or offer to, I might reserve the right to take a strident/brusque/abusive tone with the folks I am paying. Thatâs a very strange power we have inadvertently given to money, and we often do that subconsciously. And even though I am of these opinions, I still have to stop myself from doing it, because it is quite normalised (within Western societies at least).
Spend time stroking the happy cat instead.