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Comment by diegoperini | Hacker News Reader

First, you are awesome, really :)

Second, a bunch of honest questions:

Did you consult to your supervisor (or anyone with authority) to be able to bypass the support process (if there is any) like this? If so what was the response? If the response was negative, how did you convince people? After things resolve, can you kindly post how many spam or unrelated emails you receive so that it will be an example to the industry?

I'd like to put my skepticism on hold and blindly believe that your post is a reflection of pure concern and not just a PR stunt for damage control.

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The CTO at Cloudflare has to ask his supervisor before trying to help someone over at hacker news? :)

I didn't know which probably slightly proves some point other people made.

jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare. His only supervisor is eastdakota/ Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare.

Then I'd like to know the CEO's opinion then.

CTO of any company doesn't need the CEO's permission to make a customer relations post.

It's not about permission but cooperation of two disciplines.

It's hard to understand criticism when it is not put into words.

From my perspective, a developer from the company the article is about arrives in the comment section. I ask an honest question about the communication process internal to the company. I am told this developer is the CTO and is supervised by the CEO. Then I state the fact that I would appreciate if we also knew what the CEO thinks about this situation.

I don't literally expect answers from the people I addressed and that's OK, they are probably too busy working on the subject matter. If they take time and write one, that is really admirable and I'd be thankful.

What I don't understand is why it is considered inappropriate to be curious about these topics, as judged by the amount of downvotes I received.

Maybe the tone I intended for my post got lost in translation, since I'm not a native English speaker.

This reply might be what you're looking for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407399

Cloudflare is a solid company with a good reputation and has done a lot for general welfare of the internet. The staff there generally care about customers and it seems like they're trying to figure out what went wrong here, and of course preventing negative PR is always a bonus.

There's really not much of a process when you're a top officer at a company, you have the freedom and responsibility to exercise your judgement and do whatever it takes for the good of the organization.

It comes across as entitled, and also just strange and unnecessary. Like, why would you need or expect to hear directly from the CEO of Cloudflare when we're already hearing from the CTO? I'm not sure why your reply here got downvoted as well though, as I found it helpful that you explained you were simply interested in the CEO's position rather than actually expecting a response from him. So, just trying to illustrate how the initial comment came across to me, and perhaps others.

Thanks for the feedback.

"I'd like to hear CEO's opinion" probably doesn't mean "I wonder what the CEO thinks about public communication by his/her colleagues inside internet forums". I'm reminded English is hard even when I think I have a basic understanding of common speech patterns (parlance?).

Correct. In fact, even the second phrasing, "I wonder what the CEO thinks..." could easily be interpreted as expecting a response. It seems you'd have to really bend over backwards to avoid that, perhaps explicitly saying something like, "Obviously I wouldn't expect him to respond here, but I'm curious whether the CEO shares this view." Or something like that.

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