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Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

I canceled all my personal jetbrains products a few years ago after meeting some of their team at GopherCon.

I vote with my money and I was a 5+ year subscriber up until that point. I visited their booth with same enthusiasm as other posters here and lavished praise on their tooling and talked about how excited I was for their Go IDE and they just stared at me and said “Ok, thanks”.

Something so empty and almost a pretentious kind of tone when it was said was a massive turnoff. Why even come to a conference if you don’t want to engage with your users?

I don’t expect my story to change any hearts or minds and I still use their tools when a company provides them for Java work but I’ve replaced my usage of their other tools with VS Code and plug-ins for my personal projects.

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I'm sorry to hear that. We really strive to talk to everyone we can, and we are happy to hear all the stories from subscribers, or otherwise. Feedback, and more importantly, meeting with people is why we go to conferences.

Can you please remember at which GopherCon / year this happened?

I'm usually part of all the conferences teams and I can say that at conferences such as GopherCon US 2019, I speak daily with 200-300 people easily at the booth.

All of our booth staff is developers + myself (Developer Advocate) and from time to time we are joined by our Product Marketing Manager.

It's not an excuse for this type of reply, and I believe that nobody should be treated like this.

You stopped using their tools because some people at a conference didn't respond enthusiastically enough to your praise?

I understand why it seems that cut and dry - one of those “in the moment” or “you’d have to have been there” I guess.

Not to invalidate the way you feel about that interaction, but putting myself in their shoes- I’m not sure my response would be much better.

Running a booth at a conference is EXHAUSTING. Also, that was your first interaction with them and you were at peak excitement. That might’ve been the thousandth time they had heard similar and their spark may have faded by the time you got there.

I get it though, we feel the way we feel. It sucks when your enthusiasm goes un-matched. I’ve written off companies for interactions a more objective bystander might charitably forgive.

BTW- I’ve got no relation to the company or product. I’m just a happy customer who’s run a booth or two in my day and also felt the same way as you about other companies too.

Maybe is a culture/language thing. Because I am not a native English speaker and I almost never have to speak (only read and write) when we have a video conference I always express myself with few words because I am aware how terrible I sound so I will use a lot of OK,Yes, Sure ...

Yes, those Russians can be quite blunt. I once found a great library maintained by a Russian guy that had zero issues on Github. I created an issue for a feature request and was brushed off with unexpected rudeness. Later I looked at this again and found that he was absolutely correct with his argument and his communication was just very efficient and I am sure he did not mean to be rude.

Could be possibly because they were Czech? The culture is very different from what Americans are used to. Very reserved, very matter-of-fact, no smalltalk.

Jetbrains is mostly Russian. Their main development center is in St. Petersburg (Kotlin is actually a name of the island in St. Petersburg archipelago).

Perhaps it was run by some introverted developer-types? Or there were some cultural differences at play? The reaction seems a bit excessive and I'm not sure if it characterizes the company as a whole.

Cutting off the nose to spite the face

Is it possible the booth was ran by marketing and not developers? Either way thats pretty awful.

I was asking a genuine question, I've seen some sassy marketing people, but when I talk to developers at booth is a whole different attitude (positive) when they see other developers.

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