Comment by potatosareok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatosareok | Hacker News Reader

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I get that but I'm wondering who is this postmortem written for? For other engineers? Not entirely - it's seems to be written partly as PR piece.

In that case I don't need to basically congratulate Stripe on messing up and then posting PR piece on how they messed up, especially when it's such a trivial mistake (by that I mean it's not anything technically interesting for what went wrong). I guess I'll concede that what is technically interesting is not objective - many things I consider complicated other would consider basic, so I don't really have the right to serve as the arbiter of what is technically interesting.

What happened? We dropped an index. Why? Bad tooling. Fix? Patch code, add index. Future fix? Vague goals to stop this from happening.

Though I might be taking it too far, I don't see why I need to give props to someone for doing messing up something relatively basic and then fixing it - don't people complain enough about kids getting participation trophies?

Anyway, don't mean to call out any specific Stripe engineer, it's failed process at multiple levels (guy who drops index has no visibility into DB?).

> I get that but I'm wondering who is this postmortem written for?

For their customers.

> In that case I don't need to basically congratulate Stripe on messing up and then posting PR piece on how they messed up, especially when it's such a trivial mistake (by that I mean it's not anything technically interesting for what went wrong).

Few screw-ups are ever that technically interesting. The point of a postmortem isn't to be interesting, it's to explain what went wrong, why, and what you are doing to prevent it from happening again in the future.

I would encourage you to accept that their post mortem was released in good faith, and its purpose is to both technical knowledge sharing as well as PR. I know I personally value technical organizations that are honest and forthcoming when things go south.

> I know I personally value technical organizations that are honest and forthcoming when things go south.

Why? How does the honesty (in this case openness really) change the quality?

Genuine question: Would you rather have an org that's always reliable but private in their tech or one that has issues but open about them?

The second. Because "always reliable" isn't. So when something goes down and there is nothing being communicated, that's truly infuriating.

This particular post-mortem by Stripe makes me trust them less as it's a fairly simple mistake that shouldn't have been made.

Plenty of companies also communicate the status and that something is happening but don't fully expound on all the internal details. Not sure why it's such a big difference if they did. It feels like fake PR trust to me.

> This particular post-mortem by Stripe makes me trust them less as it's a fairly simple mistake that shouldn't have been made.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. I don't think its going to hurt their business at all.

Didn't say it was going to hurt their business. Only that a post-mortem doesn't somehow change my opinion on their quality or reputation, and in this case is the opposite.

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