Posted on May 19, 2018 at 18:14The staff participation level has been an issue here for a decade. There are several issues here, real support is expensive, you pay your garage mechanics $90/hr to work on your problems, but when it comes to computers and chips everyone expects support for free. Going to have to sell a lot of $5 chips to carry $1000 of baggage for every tom,dick and harry with an issue. The good engineers you want to interact with are several levels away and not keen or equipped to deal with everyone's minutia.
For commercial accounts, register your project with your local/regional rep, have interactions with them and the FAE that support them. The FAE can either deal with the problems directly, or with the internal engineering teams, or application experts.
Unless you're a $1M repeat customer don't expect engineers to air-drop to your location. The likes of Apple, Nike and Whirlpool might expect this, but they also have strong track records, and deep rosters of in-house talent.
On the other hand ST spends a lot of money on development/evaluations boards, seminars, and tech roadshows, to get the boards in to the hands of everyone. This seems to lack the depth of FAE and technical talent to adequately support it all. There seems to be the perception in management that 'if you build it, they will come' and that some how support and expertise will manifest by itself. I'm sure that things don't work that way, people tend to be self focused, and providing support is a mostly thankless task. Everyone wants 'help', but this is almost an entirely asymmetrical experience.
I've explained more times than I care that they need to focus on initial customer experience, to have stuff work out of the box, and with common use cases, because if this is left in a rough state, with repeated problems, then the forum is going to be full of noise from stupid problems that could have been addressed/managed with a little care and attention to the deliverables.
