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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

This actually definitely moved it to "not in a million years" for me. What kind of clown show engineering team makes this kind of oversight? They knew there were profiles that would be part of the old 12-month delay feature (and if they didn't know about this feature that also speaks volumes about their internal knowledge of their own product) and neglected to fix it or notify them about their new options. What else are they neglecting?

This is not a weird edge case or a nobody-could-have-caught this. This should have been obvious and come up immediately in the "how are we thoroughly addressing this dark pattern" root-cause.

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The world is much worse if we don't let people correct their mistakes.

This now marks the 2nd time we are "letting" this company fix the same mistake, and it gets harder to assume good faith when the same issue crops up repeatedly.

Calling out poor engineering is not prohibiting them from fixing it. It's calling the bluff on "oopsie woopsie a privacy issue again, silly us," for a company whose primary KPI is public profile engagement. The more things like this happen, the less they look like mistakes.

It's taken me a long time to understand this, but sometimes the single mistake is something that leads to a cavalcade of mistakes. That could be putting a burned out person in the review pipeline who greenlights everything, it could be an overzealous engineer trying to make a name for themselves with retention and engagement, etc...

As pointed out earlier, we do need to let people make mistakes, and often their paths will appear to be non-linear. I struggle with this too, but a world that doesn't understand that is much worse.

> The more things like this happen, the less they look like mistakes.

That's a fallacy and being kind to humans is hard.

'What kind of clown show engineering team makes this kind of oversight?'

either you've never worked at a company or you've only worked at one or two places, and they had astoundingly high standards for successful collaboration. what were they, because now i want to apply to work there.

It's news to me that fully fixing a bug constitutes an "astoundingly high standard for successful collaboration." I consider that a baseline expectation, across my 14 years and 5 different companies of industry experience.

I stand by my point that this is a symptom of amateur hour engineering.

Seriously, can you list those 5 companies? Because where I am currently at, this level of ineptitude is something to aspire to.

Fully fixing every bug constitutes an astoundingly high standard for successful collaboration. Every place I've worked fully fixed some bugs, after all. You'd think that massive company-threatening bugs that result in damage control to the press would be different, and they are, but often not in a way that makes them more likely to be fully fixed.

I note that you seem to have ignored my question entirely, in what I can only characterize as mean-spirited discourtesy.

It's the one bug involved in a huge outrage and a statement from the CEO. It's the one bug that they announced publicly that they fixed, despite absolutely knowing that they didn't. So yeah, just one bug.

(Nothing against this PM, btw. But what a bunch of incompetence from the CEO)

Awesome. Would you mind answering the question posed above you? I’m definitely curious myself.

Looking at the public bug tracker of any mildly large company teaches me that fully fixing a bug just isn’t a thing they do.

This is something that can happen even if everybody is aware of the problem. We don't know what their internal structure looks like, but in enough places I've worked, if something like this would happen, it would be clear that something needs to be done, but it would also be everybody thinking it's someone else's responsibility to do it, so the end result is that it doesn't get done until someone notices the problem again after it should have already been addressed. That's bad, but not "not in a million years" bad, in my opinion.

The question is more like 'clown show, or evil clown show?'

If you think the former is uniquely horrible, you've not run into the latter :)

I feel like you either haven't worked at many early startups, or there is a bit of a double standard here.

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