Comment by justinludwig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinludwig | Hacker News Reader

I can't say that I've ever been a fan of Atlassian or their products, but this blog post makes it sounds like they've at least learned the right lessons from this:

1. Establish universal "soft deletes" across all systems.

2. Better DR for multi-site, multi-product incidents.

3. Fix their incident-management process for large-scale incidents.

4. Fix their incident communications.

Regarding #4 in particular:

"Rather than wait until we had a full picture, we should have been transparent about what we did know and what we didn't know. Providing general restoration estimates (even if directional) and being clear about when we expected to have a more complete picture would have allowed our customers to better plan around the incident....

[In the future], we will acknowledge incidents early, through multiple channels. We will release public communications on incidents within hours. To better reach impacted customers, we will improve the backup of key contacts and retrofit support tooling to enable customers... [to make emergency] contact with our technical support team."

I tend to agree.

However, there's one point that makes me skeptical: there are no organizational changes, or changes to leadership, or anything in that direction.

This sounds like "the tech guys screwed up, culture and management is fine here". Which it might be, or it might not.

I would have loved to see

5. We will stop pushing customers so hard towards using our cloud

for one, but that wouldn't be convenient for Atlassian.

Note that the ToS also forbid Cloud users from “disseminating information” about “the performance of the products”.

So you can’t say it’s slow or unperforming.

I thought, in terms of Jira and Confluence at least, it was just accepted that being slow and underperforming was the status quo and if it was running at a speed you'd consider normal, that's an exception (and cause for alarm... like "did that actually save or is there a silent JS error not being displayed?").

Sure, it’d be extremely hard for their cloud offering to be slower than our on-premise installation.

Well that's some Oracle-tier shit.

(ref: https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/)

Not just benchmarks, Oracle also sues (or threatens) security researchers, vendors, and of course customers for less.

Is that real? That is so bad. Queue up next “Shall not disclose or notice our incompetence” clause.

https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

> 3.3. Restrictions. Except as otherwise expressly permitted in these Terms, you will not:

> (i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products; or (j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing.

That should tell you everything you need to know about atlassian as a company and about how good their cloud product is.

I believe these clauses are usually there to prevent competitors from using (sometimes misleading) benchmarks in their advertising.

Used to be common to see this kind of comparisons between databased for example.

Link for reference: https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

> Except as otherwise expressly permitted in these Terms, you will not:

> ... (i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products;

I wouldn’t expect the larger question of what organizational and management issues lead to the problem in the larger sense to be made public. At least not while the issue is still fresh. Maybe down the road as a business school case study after some of the players retire.

By keeping the management you have a chance they learn a lot from that unique experience. Changing leadership would be the PR move.

You can change leadership, but if culture is the problem, then you're out of luck.

I am actually pleasantly surprised at the openness of this response, and their taking responsibility of mistakes and detailing what will change in the future. It's not just corporate speak. I think that speaks well for the company and it improved my view of them.

Why do you assert that this is not just corporate pr?

Of course, this is a part of public relations for a corporation.

But usually when we people talk about "corporate pr" they talk about weasel words, non-committal statements, and deflecting blame away from them. I think this PIR does a decent job of acknowledging the mistakes they make and how they can improve.

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