Showing results for No good deed goes unpunished - The Old New Thing

Oct 25, 2011
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No good deed goes unpunished: Helping to redirect a question

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It is a common occurrence that a question is sent to a mailing that is close, but not quite right. Usually somebody will provide information to help redirect the question to a more appropriate mailing list. But this effort does not always go unpunished. From: X A customer is encountering a problem with Product Q when they blah blah blah. C...

OtheremailNo good deed goes unpunished
May 18, 2010
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No good deed goes unpunished, part 2, redux

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I noted some time ago that I have taken to "blaming" Exchange when someone assumes that my reply to a thread on a distribution list implies that I have taken responsibility for resolving their problem. One of my colleagues in another group is in a similar situation with respect to a different product, and he has taken to using the same basic form...

Non-ComputerNo good deed goes unpunished
Oct 12, 2007
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No good deed goes unpunished: Free code samples

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Or free code either. Many years ago, I wrote some samples for the SDK as a favor, and at each major SDK release, I am reminded that no good deed goes unpunished. I can tell when a major SDK release is coming, because I get a piece of mail that goes something like this: Hi. You are on file as the owner of at...

OtherNo good deed goes unpunished
May 17, 2007
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We're all in this together: No good deed goes unpunished, redux

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

There were several suggestions as to how I could avoid being tagged as the owner of an issue because I helped route the problem. Many of them involved assigning the bug back to the testers to "teach them a lesson". Punishing the tester doesn't help the product. Remember, we're all in this together. The goal is to fix bugs and ship a quality prod...

OtherNo good deed goes unpunished
Oct 19, 2006
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No good deed goes unpunished, part 2

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. When I reply to a question on an internal discussion list, often with a clarifying question rather than an answer, it will occasionally happen that the person I replied to will send a response directly to me rather than including the discussion list. This is bad for a few reasons. When ...

CodeemailNo good deed goes unpunished
Apr 26, 2006
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No good deed goes unpunished: Bug assignment

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. The other day I got a piece of email requesting that I look at a crashed system because the tester believed it was another instance of bug 12345. While that may very well have been the case, bug 12345 was a kernel pool corruption bug in the object manager, something of which I kno...

OtherNo good deed goes unpunished