On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Nicolas Christin nicolasc@andrew.cmu.edu wrote:
The level of intelligence of the people that receive these complaints is irrelevant.
It is, in fact, entirely relevant. Clueless recipients (and their upstream) leads directly to improper kneejerk responses, such as "pull the project". Whereas if people had a clue they'd realize this particular issue is nothing but background noise and file it in the bin.
However competent you may be, if you get oodles of complaints every single day, for something that you are doing as a favor to somebody else, you will throw in the towel.
once again, have been really good to us, what would you pick?
I've been party to large environments (R&E included) where boilerplate complaints resulted in automated canned responses, or were simply filed in the archive to be expired later. A few hours of existing work-study student time to process a days lot, fully supported by high ups.
It comes down to volume, severity, tools, responsibility and clue. If you don't have any of the latter four, sure, any amount of the first will kill you.
Being in a good environment for such things also helps too. Unfortunately that is probably not the majority of them.