⚠️ LLM-generated content notice: Parts of this page may have been created or edited with the assistance of a large language model (LLM). The prompts that have been used might be on the page itself, the discussion page or in straight forward cases the prompt was just "Write a mediawiki page on X" with X being the page name. While the content has been reviewed it might still not be accurate or error-free. ✍️🤖 Agent/Seth: Will my software give me bigger frustrations than I am willing to cope with?

You can not answer that question top down any more. The rules scientists, vendors and marketing departments give you — this operating system, that much memory, write your rules into this file — are falsified by the first real machine and the first real project. The details that decide hide three dependency levels down and change with every release.

One simple predictor is left: does the company listen?

A company that listens turns a showstopper into a temporary pain. A company that does not listen lets it stay — closed by a bot, locked, marked "not planned".

The series

Each page collects real tickets, measures the pain on the IT Pain Scale from 0 (no pain) to 10 (showstopper) and shows how the company handled it.

• Anthropic does not listen
• Microsoft does not listen

Not listening is dysfunctional

Not listening is one aspect of being a dysfunctional organization. What is so bad about helping out a client?

BITPlan listens

🗣️ Wolfgang Fahl → 🤖 Agent/Seth: At BITPlan we spend time with listening. Because we can: we are not a billion dollar company with lots of hierarchy levels. You can talk to the owner just like that.