October 24th, 2024

The information in this article has been verified to be compliant with Samsung's dissemination requirements. To be specific, there are no dissemination or privacy requirements to be held legal standard to, and no non-disclosure agreement has been signed in this regard.

Finally, Samsung's yearly round of MX repair competitions have arrived again, and today's the day! Weeks of wrecked nerves were due to settle one way or another. Above all else, I was keen to create new memories, new friends, and new results. The events of this trip, for better or worse, allowed me to gain a new perspective from where I was previously stuck in endless consideration.

New memories

This year's event was significantly different from last year. While Samsung willfully spent tens of thousands to make this happen, I did notice that this event was considerably scaled back compared to last year -- and has been on trend of doing so ever since the very first MX Skills Competition from 2019. Whereas last year was a three-day venture, this year's was barely 24 hours, and we were whisked from Samsung's HQ directly to the airports after the competiton. While this was a fun way to celebrate, it was obviously an extraneous display of fun and reward from Samsung themselves that was in no way required. I am simply noting that this didn't occur this time. There was also no tour of Samsung's HQ building.

This scheduling posed an issue as I had the vague feeling that I left my phone (Flip6) at Samsung's HQ as I went from the rideshare to the airport, which is a one-time 40 minute trip. Times were so tight that there was absolutely no chance of circling back to receive my phone and risk being trapped in Texas for an unknown period of time (no extra flights were available). I did ask someone if they saw me carry my phone, which they said that they thought they saw it, but this wasn't the case. I am able to track my phone in front of Samsung's Legacy Central location, and no one has turned it in. It is also now out of charge, and none of the companies, including Samsung, operate on the weekends. It hasn't rained since then, but the chances of recovery are nearly zero. I also asked Samsung's employees to check the location an hour after I confirmed its location, and they couldn't find it.

After the events of the trip, and after the choices made by the senior engineers in charge of the event, I am significantly demoralised. The results of the competition seem to be skewed by emotional vengeance, underlined by misplaced punishment of Samsung's own limitations, and not directly ranked based on measure of skill or technique. This caused multiple psychological issues on principle of being a person who prefers to factor in reality rather than emotion. Once again, I am overjoyed to be able to bring back critical and helpful information to my coworkers back home from the source of it all (especially when this information was never... documented outside of the minds of Samsung's own hardware engineers, and especially not located in the manuals and guides of Samsung's own documentation). On the positive side, some of our store district's longstanding mysteries have finally been solved.

New friends

A small surprise is that I am the only person from last year to return in 2024. It is a bit sad not to see any familiar faces from 2023, but it's always cool to see fresh personalities with new insight for how their home turf operates. This year, a select number of uBreakiFix employees, ranging from technicians, lead technicians, store managers, and district managers, have all assembled here in Plano. There were also Samsung technicians, and the mix of these technicians from all companies total fifteen, the same number as last year. Like last year, I was exposed to stories of other uBreakiFix locations running in extreme disarray, which brought initial dismay for my future at this company and my ability to attend further events sponsored by Samsung. For the privacy and protection of those locations, and their employees, I will not detail those issues here.

During this trip, I was notified by management about issues I am involved with at my home location. The funniest thing about this is to hear, without even mentioning the details of my situation, how others in positions above my own (including a person who is practically a store co-owner) implicitly justified and replicated actions I took at their own store, whereas those actions landed me in trouble under the management of my own location. This further feeds into my frustration with the management and ownership of my current location that I feel to be powerless in, despite knowing that my actions do not feed into self-fulfilling prophecies that lead to further issues down the line. I plan to introduce much of the information disseminated from this experience to a uBreakiFix meeting soon, and hopefully bring about positive change, instead of being subjected to self-contradictory business practices that lead to the store state being the way it is now.

Unlike last year, I finally did exchange phone numbers and emails with the other finalists, and it felt nice to share bonds with people with extraordinary personal experiences in fields that I have personal interests in. While most of us only shared words over dinner, others kept closer for the duration of the entire event.

New results

The meat of my dismay comes here. Once the competition started, the process went suspiciously well, and I was passing tests on the first try that I never dreamed of being able to do under the constraints of my location at home, which unfortunately lacks access to certain tools and equipment. Some of these tests are, generally speaking, a nightmare to complete under normal circumstances, and I didn't have hope to complete them properly in this run. However, I passed them, while looking like a natural professional to boot! I am, to say the least, overjoyed to be one of the few people statistically to run into no friction for the most problematic repair steps nationwide in this event.

I full-heartedly made a minor mistake that resulted in water resistance testing failing upon reassembling the device. Here, I want to explicitly state that I have witnessed other finalists who weren't able to get to the reassembly step in the first place, and failed to properly triage and/or disassemble the phone without destroying parts of it. I got far while doing nearly all steps correctly.

Everything went well until it came to the final quality check. I missed an adhesive around a microphone for water resistance, and accidentally reused the existing adhesive. This caused water-resistance testing to fail, leading to the test software to lock up until this was resolved. This is a limitation of Samsung's software, and it will not let you know the quality of other components or repairs until water resistance testing has passed. To get around this, I skipped the water resistance test explicitly only to check if I correctly repaired and properly triaged the undisclosed defects of the device. This choice not only invalidated the entire examination, skipping the water resistance test deducted a significant amount of points that caused me to rank below those who have explicitly caused damage to the phone during the exam and employed incorrect repair practices. That is to say, my desire to view the final results of my repair instead of "giving up" at WRT and simply netting a DQ for not completing the exam is seen as significantly less desirable than damaging the device. Samsung's test on water resistance is tested via an auditory measure of pressure via a feedback loop. That is to say, software is used to measure the watertightness of a phone. It is not a proper measure of hardiness or "water resistance" in any capacity, and is known to Samsung's own engineers to have varying degrees of accuracy.

This was incredibly distressing and frustrating. If Samsung refuses to honour warranty for liquid damaged devices, there is no reason to so violently rank a device failing water resistance lower than a physically broken device though explicit incompetence. To be specific, not applying a tape near a microphone is significantly less impactful to the customer than destroying their perfectly working display during disassembly and/or reassembly, all of which was witnessed. My stance on this will not change, especially when it comes between a person recovering their life's important moments and documents. My proctor also noted that he noticed novel actions I took that positively promoted efficiency and repair safety (while not sacrificing repair quality) that he never considered beforehand, and he has been in this industry almost as long as I have been along.

While my performance this year was leaps and bounds stronger than last year's, my results ranked lowest due to disproportionate point deduction as I committed the crime of assembling a functional device that was able to otherwise pass 100% of the quality checks, discluding water-resistance. To Samsung, breaking a phone or abandoning a repair is preferable behaviour.

If you were a customer, would you like to be told that your phone was unrepairable as it was found to be only 90% as water resistant after the repair, and that you would not be able to get your phone serviced at all, barring you from your memories as a result of an active choice of an executive at Samsung?

New opportunities

For better or worse, all of us now act as senior repair consultants for Samsung, having a direct line of communication to improve repair processes and guidelines to incorporate in official manuals. While I see the events here as misguided and unreasonable, I have been given multiple tools to directly influence and promote compliance and information retention amongst Samsung's entire network of mobile repair technicians and Samsung-authorised technicians. I will be taking advantage of this to prevent situations like this from happening in the future. So, I guess it wasn't all bad.