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Digi-Key has changed and it is not very good
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gussy:
I made my first marketplace purchase through DigiKey this week. DigiKey sent out a quick 5 question, 1-5 stars survey after the order was received which makes me hopeful that persistently bad marketplace vendors will get kicked off the platform. We'll see how this goes longer term.
james_s:

--- Quote from: gussy on January 21, 2021, 11:18:54 pm ---That's a very scorched earth policy, do you have the same policy for the products or devices that you create?

"Hello yes the widget you designed then sold me broke, it's bad and you should feel bad. I could tell you how it broke but I need you to send me $100 first, then I will share the details with you." :-DD

--- End quote ---

I'm already paying them for a service, and I see no indication that they are putting any effort into actually fixing the problems that people are complaining about so why should I waste my own free time finding their bugs for them? They should be paying testers to do this work for them so that the sort of bugs we're seeing do not escape into the field in the first place. My attitude about this sort of thing took it's current direction when Microsoft decided to outsource most of their QA to the consumer. The fact that they're too cheap to pay staff to perform that important task for them doesn't mean that I'm obligated to do it for them for free.

If I develop a widget I don't expect the customer to find all the bugs for me. Maybe there's an edge case that slipped through my processes in which case I'm happy to hear about it and I'll make an effort to fix it for them as soon as possible. But if I sell a widget that is a piece of crap with all kinds of glaring faults suggesting I couldn't be bothered to even test it at all before I sold it to the customer then I'd expect the customer to take their business elsewhere.
tooki:

--- Quote from: james_s on January 22, 2021, 11:56:05 pm ---
--- Quote from: gussy on January 21, 2021, 11:18:54 pm ---That's a very scorched earth policy, do you have the same policy for the products or devices that you create?

"Hello yes the widget you designed then sold me broke, it's bad and you should feel bad. I could tell you how it broke but I need you to send me $100 first, then I will share the details with you." :-DD

--- End quote ---

I'm already paying them for a service, and I see no indication that they are putting any effort into actually fixing the problems that people are complaining about so why should I waste my own free time finding their bugs for them? They should be paying testers to do this work for them so that the sort of bugs we're seeing do not escape into the field in the first place. My attitude about this sort of thing took it's current direction when Microsoft decided to outsource most of their QA to the consumer. The fact that they're too cheap to pay staff to perform that important task for them doesn't mean that I'm obligated to do it for them for free.

If I develop a widget I don't expect the customer to find all the bugs for me. Maybe there's an edge case that slipped through my processes in which case I'm happy to hear about it and I'll make an effort to fix it for them as soon as possible. But if I sell a widget that is a piece of crap with all kinds of glaring faults suggesting I couldn't be bothered to even test it at all before I sold it to the customer then I'd expect the customer to take their business elsewhere.

--- End quote ---
Your logic makes sense except for the fact that the premises it’s based on are entirely wrong. Microsoft never actually reduced testing: has more testers than programmers, and everything undergoes massive ongoing automated testing as well. (It’s the immense complexity of modern software (and hardware) that’s been responsible for a lot of the problems, as well as releases being driven by marketing decisions rather than doneness.)

It’s easy to think of others as being lazier than you, but in reality, that feeling is often unjustified.
olkipukki:

--- Quote from: olkipukki on December 03, 2020, 01:33:15 pm ---DK is almost ready to became full-time "FBA"  ::)


--- Quote ---Digi-Key breaks ground on 2.2 million square foot Product Distribution Center expansion. First package from new facility is projected to ship in mid-late 2021.

--- End quote ---

http://www.digikey.com/en/resources/about-digikey#tabs-2

--- End quote ---


It looks like DK allows to sell anyone (of course who passed their onboarding team), not long time ago used to be only suppliers with USA warehouse...


--- Quote ---Can I join the Digi-Key Marketplace if I don’t have a US-based warehouse?
Yes, you can!

--- End quote ---

 ::)
james_s:

--- Quote from: tooki on January 23, 2021, 10:56:29 am ---Your logic makes sense except for the fact that the premises it’s based on are entirely wrong. Microsoft never actually reduced testing: has more testers than programmers, and everything undergoes massive ongoing automated testing as well. (It’s the immense complexity of modern software (and hardware) that’s been responsible for a lot of the problems, as well as releases being driven by marketing decisions rather than doneness.)

It’s easy to think of others as being lazier than you, but in reality, that feeling is often unjustified.

--- End quote ---

I feel that I have a better view into this than most observers since I worked at MS for about the first 10 years of my career as a professional tester during what I would consider their golden age in the Win98 through XP era when it was really a fantastic place to work, filled with some of the most amazing people I've ever met. I was actually there, I saw it all from the inside and don't have to speculate and although that was quite a long time ago I still have many good friends who work there. I left for greener pastures when they cut the pay scale for QA engineers roughly in half and made a big push to replace it with automation and developers unit testing their own code. Nadella quoted at some point "Who better to test the code than the developers who wrote it" to which I would say who WORSE to test it than the developers who wrote it, I could go on a whole rant detailing why but that doesn't really matter, just look at the market share for Windows 8 and the adoption percentage of the Edge browser as examples of the result. During that time friends still working there who were mostly developers and middle managers were complaining that they couldn't find decent testers, well, duh, they were trying to pay them peanuts while other companies still offered competitive wages. This led to a large talent bleed as experienced people fled to various startups, some of which later became big. For a while MS had almost no QA engineers at all but that started to change just a few years ago after several disastrous releases including data-loss bugs that escaped into the field that led to some major internal drama. Even now they still have the majority of their testing automated which is great for regression testing but automation will never see an edge case and go looking for it, and it's very, very easy to fall into a trap where the automation is passing so you think everything is fine, but it is rare that anyone really takes a close look at what sort of real world use cases the automation is covering. Being a good SDET is a lot like being a good technician, it's not as glamorous as being a SDE or hardware engineer but it requires a lot of the same skillset with an additional skillset on top of that. Developing useful automated test scripts is far more than coding, it requires the skills of a tester. They have their "insider program" or whatever it's called, which is absolutely an attempt to outsource testing to unpaid fanboys instead of paying internal staff to do it.

Anyway, bottom line is companies have paid me a very good salary (better than I've made in stints of doing EE related work) to find and document defects and deficiencies in their products, so forgive me if I'm not inclined to give away my services for free. We are discussing for-profit businesses here, not charities, and I don't think you will find many professionals in any field who are interested in working for free to help someone else earn money.
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