Red Hat employee here. They most certainly are not. The people on the phone have been through a lot of training, they are all whizzes on the command line, we have an enormous in-house knowledge base that's updated continuously, and there's a clear escalation chain as well (as an engineer, I get customer cases that resist known resolutions, so I will be the one "on the internet", searching for known MariaDB issues, things like that).
RH would not be of much value if the support staff were not any more effective than the average end user.
That's my point, the guy who had the issue in the first place is doing the same thing you are.
It's only the boss that wants to pay for a safety net, forcing the issue of raising a ticket is their validation of money well spent I highly suspect. We're all human beings who are quite technical on this forum, you work for RH, the other guy works for someone else.
I have a suspicion that RH support is what the boss pays for as a backup should their employees be unable to solve a problem or decide to go to pastures new, as people do from time to time.
> That's my point, the guy who had the issue in the first place is doing the same thing you are.
they're not, because they have no idea what they're looking for, they lack the subject knowledge and expertise, and they werent involved with directly producing a lot of the open source components they are having problems with.
By "engineer" I mean, "we are the people that wrote the actual open source components they are having a problem with". It would not be in their interests to hire us directly because 95% of the time the regular support people can do everything they need without things escalated to engineering.
I very much doubt you have all the authors, some components are RH creations, but not all. In any case, a company hiring one or two open source contributors covers a lot of gaps as they're the type of people who can do deep investigations. For systemd, for sure, there's inhouse development there.
My gripe about the original thread was bosses interrupting that investigation and telling the onsite staff to open a case elsewhere, IMO, that's disruptive behaviour.
> My gripe about the original thread was bosses interrupting that investigation and telling the onsite staff to open a case elsewhere, IMO, that's disruptive behaviour.
I dont think this really happens, when we get these customer issues and the people who have tried to fix the problem are on the phone, they are lost / panicked / at a dead end. They are not like, "yeah we think it's ABC but our boss told us to call you". that's not really a thing. if customers can fix the problem, they do. they are not in a hurry to call redhat for things they can do themselves and they're not really supposed to since their support minutes are a finite resource.
Nobody would do that when logging a ticket because it shows internal company disagreement which often doesn't show the company in a great light. Nobody does that.
What typically happens in this situation is the chap logging the ticket gets pissed off and says to the boss, "ticket logged it's with $vendor, I guess it doesn't need babysitting so I'm working on other tickets now".
The boss in this case is happy as it shows their earlier investment was a fine idea. The employee though is disgruntled as their toys were taken away and things it's not such a fine place to work.
RH would not be of much value if the support staff were not any more effective than the average end user.