Yep! I have a favorite example, actually. It comes in handy in job interviews so it’s kind of burned into my memory at this point. 
I’m going to keep details vague, however, because I don’t want to cause the company any harm. While I was extremely unhappy at that job, I greatly value the experience and have no negative feelings about the company. Most of my coworkers felt like family. In fact, over a decade later, in a crisis I was able to count on them more than anyone I know. I just want to get that out there in case anyone figures out where I worked. I don’t want to risk any misinterpretation that could harm the company or any of its current or former employees.
Also, I should have said that some product managers put their needs above customer needs. I usually think of it as “the product managers” because they each had different parts of the product that they managed.
That said, the example is pretty straightforward: folders vs. tags. I worked for a company that created an online platform for managing and hosting a specific type of media file. So this is clearly understood, if I were talking about YouTube (and I’m not) that specific type of media file would mean video. So it’s more of a YouTube-type situation than a, say, Dropbox-type situation. Basically, when you uploaded files to the service, they’d show up in a list. You could sort and search the list but you couldn’t really organize it in any way. Naturally, customers were asking for folders for organization from day one. I worked for the company for two years. Folders were never implemented during that time and I fought like hell for them every chance I got.
This is where the situation gets complicated. In the beginning, it made sense that folders weren’t implemented. The company was brand new. I was employee #37 and the second person to join the customer support team. Before me, it was just my manager handling everything. I assume business development and engineering must’ve pitched in here and there, but I never actually saw that happen. I was the first official CSR they hired.
I’m going to go off on a little tangent that I think is interesting and hopefully I’m right. 
I worked at this company for about two years and the growth it experienced during my time there is comparable to the growth at Wyze over that same amount of time. Even as our team grew, we spent nearly all of our waking hours handling customer support requests. Compared to Wyze, we also had an easier product to support. There was only the one software product with a few service-level variations and most of our work involved providing instructions for how to accomplish something specific or responding to bug reports. Some of these bugs led to some very unusual job requirements, like having to watch an episode of DeGrassi once a week, but generally-speaking the work involved standard troubleshooting and letting angry people yell at you on the phone. Still, we were always overburdened. To get to the point, my employer was working with a simpler product to support and three times the funding Wyze has. The situation at Wyze seems very clear to me: they have high support standards and not enough money or people to meet them given the current demand. I think there’s a very easy solution to this problem but that’s just speculation on top of speculation. I don’t work for Wyze, never have, and could very well be wrong about everything I’m thinking. It just seems like the problem we’re seeing in this forum post results from a lack of resources to meet the demand for product support and that’s a very common problem. Wyze is just in a far better position to solve it than most companies.
Anyway, folders. In the beginning the company didn’t have the engineering resources to fix several significant bugs so they absolutely didn’t have the resources to add file management with folders. The bug that required me to watch DeGrassi once a week was similar in severity to the SD card-eating issue Wyze is facing. My former employer had fewer customers but the impact of the bug was significantly more severe to many of them. It was comparable to buying an alarm clock with a broken alarm function. For about eight months, I was that alarm function. So, under those circumstances, it didn’t make sense to add folders. I patiently waited and tried to find ways to make sense of this to customers without telling them that we didn’t even have the resources to fix a major bug in the platform. That should be an exercise in creative writing courses. Subtext isn’t easy when you only have words to work with.
Fortunately, things go well for the company and more money comes in. I’m no longer the only CSR. We also start seeing new product managers come on board around the same time. One of them—I’ll call him Edith for the purposes of convenience and misdirection—decided that folders were old news and tags were the hot new thing. For context, this happened around the time Twitter was born and Chris Messina hadn’t invented the hashtag yet. Everyone had Blackberries. Something as simple as tags—which I’ve come to think of as “lazy folders”—actually excited people in a way that I still find bizarre. If you worked at a tech company around this time you probably know what I’m talking about since it happened with a lot of weird little ideas.
But don’t get me wrong—I think tags are great. Tags are the way to go for anything associative. They are not, however, a replacement for a hierarchical file system. Why? Because in their standard implementation they do not have a hierarchy. I thought this would have been obvious at a software company but I was fresh out of college and you typically don’t look back on your past self and think “I was so much smarter back then.” I just didn’t properly understand how people worked.
Edith wasn’t originally a project manager. I don’t remember what department he started out in, but it was something unrelated like legal/contracts. I think Edith needed to prove himself and made tags his flagship campaign issue. Tags are the future of file systems! Tags can have colored dots! Tags will assure lifelong happiness and prosperity! If I’d understood human psychology better at the time, I’d have realized that there’s rarely a practical difference between a charming reality and charming nonsense when it comes to present-time decision-making. Edith voiced the positive message of change and novelty and I (and my team) voiced the dissenting opinion. It didn’t matter what the customers wanted because Edith’s idea was surrounded by positivity, promise, and inspiration. (Also, tags were faster to implement so engineering had no issues with the decision.) It was like asking a group of kids to choose between having dessert for breakfast or cleaning their room for an hour. Unfortunately, you can’t build a life around ice cream in the mornings unless you’re a diehard fan of stomach aches and diarrhea. It’s often better to realize that cleaning your room can actually make you happier.
So Edith got his way and we didn’t get folders. This was the issue that broke me. I didn’t quit for some time because I didn’t want to abandon my team. I gave up a free trip to Japan because I was worried about how much work my teammates would have to endure in my absence. (I also gave it up because it involved traveling and sharing a room with a very sexually active couple and the best-case scenario would’ve been waking up semi-regularly to sexual activity I did not want to witness. I’ll refrain from mentioning the worse alternatives.) I’ve wanted to go to Japan since I was 10 so this was a very hard decision for me. I had three dreams as a kid and that’s the one I was never able to accomplish because a health condition prohibits me from entering the country. I may never be able to go, though I’m hopeful that will change in the next decade. But this is all to say how much I felt I needed to stay at this job because everyone was overworked and exhausted. The idea of putting my team through hell while I took a two-week vacation was too much for me because I knew what it was like.
But it didn’t take long before I just couldn’t do it anymore. I believed I couldn’t do the job I was hired to do because the issues I brought up were always a lower priority. Part of that was my fault, as I didn’t recognize how to frame the issues in a way that would help people see their importance, but I didn’t know that at the time. My head was only filled with thoughts about work. I’d go to sleep and my dreams would consist of me watching myself sit at my desk and never move. I didn’t feel anything in the dream. I just saw that image until I woke up and lived it. Eventually I just had one thought repeating, constantly, in my head: “I hate my job.” When I was out with a friend one day and he asked my opinion of a problem he’d spent the last 20 minutes describing, my response was “I hate my job.” I hadn’t heard a single word he said. I gave notice first thing on Monday.
I chose to stay on for about a month—basically, the time it would take to hire and train two new CSRs. I needed to know that my team wouldn’t suffer because of me. I was so focused on this that I didn’t even consider what the heck I was going to do to pay the bills. I had absolutely no plan and wasn’t even processing that I needed one. At the time, it felt like I was saying to my team: “I’m tired of getting punched in the face every day, so is there anyone here that doesn’t mind getting punched in the face twice a day so I can leave?” That wasn’t reality but I had no life outside of this job. It was the only thing I could see and it warped my perception. It got to this point because Edith wanted to make himself stand out at the company. I had to skip my own birthday party due to a server crash that happened after the implementation of a new feature. I bet you can guess which one.
This is why I look at support-related issues differently than most people. The reasons why things don’t happen when you think they should are often very complicated and sometimes also very stupid. But I don’t hold a grudge against Edith or anything. His choices may have indirectly made my life incredibly miserable for a good while, but he was young and ambitious. He had hopes and dreams of his own. I’d be a hypocrite to believe context matters in the situation I care about and not afford him the same respect. Edith probably learned from that experience, too, because tags did not work out and folders were implemented shortly thereafter. Logic tends to prevail and patient customers tend to get what they want in the end. I just didn’t have the necessary perspective to see that at the time.
But I also get how hard it is to think about things that way. I struggle with it sometimes. Apple’s been putting faulty hardware in their laptops and lying about it since they started calling them MacBooks. I struggle with that daily as I attempt to type this on one of their “new and improved” butterfly keyboards that rests on top of a poorly-manufactured logic board that consistently fails to recognize my machine has a battery after about five minutes. My machine is less than two years old. Both of these problems are covered by out-of-warranty repair programs for my machine. For some reason my serial number isn’t part of the the program groups even though it absolutely is and I have documentation to prove it. Nevertheless, they still won’t fix the machine for free and think I should just buy another one that has the exact same issues. It’s hard to spend $2,000 on the worst computer you’ve ever owned that a company refuses to fix and think, “but what if this makes sense in context?” It’s hard to put fraud in a context you’re okay with. I know that sounds like an exaggeration to a lot of people but I don’t think most people look at the law suits Apple has lost.
Nevertheless, I put it in context because if I don’t do that I’ll only end up feeling angry and helpless. So I consider the complexity of managing a global supply chain for several different and very complex products. I think about the first time a massive problem gets discovered and how Apple’s testing process wouldn’t realistically have been able to find it which naturally leads them to believe it’s overblown at first. Then a legal battle often occurs, they’re forced to fix it, but then they release several new products with the same faulty hardware because they’ve been working on them for years and they will have nothing to release if they don’t. As a publicly traded company with obligations to its shareholders, they simply cannot do that. Does that justify fraud? No. It does, however, remind me that the pain their products cause me and a lot of other customers has more to do with the way businesses are essentially forced to operate in America than it does with concepts of greed and negligence. And that’s without imagining how many Edith-type problems exist at Apple to complicate things further, or any of the other things I’ll never consider because I just don’t have enough information to make that possible.
I think it gets a lot easier when boiling it all down to this: humans make human mistakes. They are not the villains of our imaginations, but just us in a different and unique situation that we don’t understand. Nothing good ultimately comes from hate. I think it’s just better to be kind and compassionate even if someone doesn’t deserve it because everyone is more sad and lonely than we think they are. Before murderers are murderers, they’re typically depressed and isolated people that can’t hold their pain in anymore and express it in a very horrible way. My customer support job was far from the worst life experiences I’ve ever had, but it doesn’t take the worst experience to break someone. It’s usually something less and that job happened to follow the biggest trauma of my life. So the job broke me and I had no plan to find work and pay my bills, but it didn’t matter. Pretty much everyone at the company, including Edith (to a small extent), helped me find something new. I didn’t ask. They just did it. At the time, I didn’t understand why and people would laugh at me when I asked them as if it were obvious. But, to me, I never looked at anything I did as “nice” or “kind.” My job was to solve problems so that’s what I tried to do. From my perspective, I failed at it—miserably. But on my way out, everyone made sure I knew that I was wrong about that.
Now I look at most problems like I’m troubleshooting a computer. Human behavior is often more predictable, anyway, since I have a good point of reference by being one already. It’s easy to think something’s taking too long to fix and there’s no excuse, but in those situations I think it makes more sense to also consider all the times you’ve stayed in a bad job or relationship you should’ve left earlier, how easily you made yourself miserable trying to do what you thought you parents expected of you, and how you desperately want to make time to exercise and eat better but don’t think you can. Every stupid or amazing thing we do happens within the same core behavioral framework that makes us human—we all just develop our unique process for carrying out those actions. So when something seems horribly wrong, I think there’s always an “Edith” in there somewhere and not a villain. I think reality is a lot more interesting than good versus evil, and nothing ever got better because someone hated it enough.
One of my failings as a person is a lack of concision, so I’ll just wrap this up with an apology for the length. But I have a really hard time shutting up with this story in particular because of the impact it had on my life.
