College students…

All through college I never thought of sending an email to technical support of any semiconductor company, it was some sort of “student modesty” that I thought I should have, so all my stay in college the only contact I had with semiconductor companies was to get samples, and then I battled for hours with their demo boards. Today someone reminded me that I was one of the go-to guys to get the HC908QT4 demo boards we had in our school lab to work, good times.

Nowadays I’m a technical support engineer and we constantly get requests from students asking for all sorts of support, although I’ve read some really interesting questions from college students, most questions are of the please-spend-an-extra-hour-figuring-this-out-instead-of-bothering-me sort. Maybe it’s my pride talking, but it really gets me angry when students treat technical support like their own personal code monkeys. College is the time when they are learning to do that (learn their technical skills, becoming a code monkey or a manager is a combination of luck, decision, hard work, etc.)

I once had a student ask me to write their homework code for them (without even a small attempt to hide the fact that it was a school assignment). We have a politic to not develop code for students, it’s not that we don’t want to, it’s that we just don’t have enough personnel to write every code snippet request we get (although I do enjoy telling them we won’t be doing their homework), but we do send code snippets that have already been written. This particular request was for something that was very similar to something I already had available  (let’s say he needed a USB HID mouse and I only had an HID keyboard example). I sent it to him, told him which files he needed to modify and sent him on his way. A week later I received a “very dissatisfied” survey from him, saying he didn’t like that fact that I didn’t send exactly what he was requesting. Per our policy I had to call him or email him to request feedback. His phone number was bogus and he never answered my email. I wonder what grade he got for that project.