The Old New Thing

No good deed goes unpunished - The Old New Thing

No good deed goes unpunished: Helping to redirect a question

October 25, 2011 Oct 25, 2011 10/25/11
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 ...

No good deed goes unpunished, part 2, redux

May 18, 2010 May 18, 2010 05/18/10
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...

No good deed goes unpunished: Free code samples

October 12, 2007 Oct 12, 2007 10/12/07
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 ...

We're all in this together: No good deed goes unpunished, redux

May 17, 2007 May 17, 2007 05/17/07
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...

No good deed goes unpunished, part 2

October 19, 2006 Oct 19, 2006 10/19/06
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. I ...

No good deed goes unpunished: Bug assignment

April 26, 2006 Apr 26, 2006 04/26/06
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 ...