Top level engineers and other VIPs are people too. And it is often surprising how "low" they can get.

We may imagine the CEO of a large company in his throne room, only reachable through his servant and only for matters of utmost importance, billion dollar contracts and all that. And sure, there is that, but not just that.

You may occasionally find out that the guy who a replaced a defective Ethernet cable on the intern's computer was that CEO. Or the lead developer of a AAA game patiently explaining some basic functionality to a random gamer. A CTO may pick up a random support call. So Raymond Chen debugging an "obvious" problem in a .bat script, not at all surprising to me.

It has already happened to me that on a support call where I expect some underpaid grunt, find that the guy is really good, patient and friendly, only to end up discovering that I just talked to the one who built the whole thing. Makes my day when it happens.

It think that if I was some kind of VIP top level whatever, I would cherish these moments. Simple things, genuine human contact, away from the big responsibilities tied to my position. And even from a professional perspective, getting a feel for what happens down there is important.

> How much are these customers paying for support to have Raymond Chen on first level support to debug their batch files?

Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?

Or maybe he was on a project working directly with the client already, so this was just part of whatever he was working on.

Senior people like Raymond Chen (or at least the good ones) often get to where they are by doing some amount of work that's "below them" or outside their scope in order to keep their understanding of the full stack up to date.

It wouldn't surprise me if he's periodically snooping the lowest level support queues from time to time to understand what kinds of issues customers face, where the pain points are, etc, etc.

I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Chen was browsing through open tickets, found this one, and grabbed it.