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Comment by edcastano | Hacker News Reader

I am a PM with LinkedIn. DM me and I can try to funnel this to the right channels. I'll be the first to say that there are a lot of problems with LinkedIn, but the company's "heart" is generally in the right place.

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Why are you recommending private support channels? Shouldn't OP use your regular customer support channels?

Private support channels just speed things up, because you can directly go to the right teams/people. A large, distributed workforce working on large, complicated web applications means escalation channels get murky.

Front line support is unlikely to be able to help you here. This doesn't seem like a particularly common occurrence. Here's how things typically go with weird cases like this:

1.) Support agent gets the case and says 'Uh, what do I do with this?' Escalation to team lead. 2.) Team lead reviews case and doesn't know what to do. Team lead escalates to manager. 4.) Manager reviews the case and tries to figure out the right team to send this to 5.) Manager sends it to a team. Team reviews the case. If it's the right team, they'll start investigating. 6.) If it's not the right team, the manager has to figure out another team that could be responsible for the case. 7.) Repeat 5&6 until the right team is identified

This all takes time. And assumes that the original customer support agent actually understands the issue for the security issue it is. Many frontline customer support agents are not particularly technical, so the agent may not even understand they have a security event on their hands.

Or, a PM who knows the right people to go to, offers help and things get quickly escalated.

It's the same reason why going through HR to get a job is inefficient and prone to failure, while "private channels" are more efficient for everyone and get the right person to the right job for the right price FASTER.

Not sure if this is in good faith or not, but escalating through an internal contact is going to skip a couple layers of support at minimum, and reduce the chance of a misunderstanding. Also potentially some people in CS might be in on whatever is going on.

If you were being snarky, it seems like this LinkedIn employee is trying to do the right thing. They probably don’t run support/there’s no reason to take cheap shots when they offer to help.

It's not a cheap shot. It's snarky but accurate commentary on the abysmal state of customer support and how absolutely worthless it is

Anyone who has worked front-line customer support knows why all the roadblocks are in place; it's a massive firehose of absolute junk 90% of the time.

Yep. My first job out of college was support at a consumer web company. The vast majority of people did not need a PMs attention. Honestly a larger percentage of them needed psychiatric help.

The problem comes when there’s no escalation path for the few cases that actually do need it. Looking at you Google.

I’ve never used LinkedIn support, so couldn’t say whether they would handle something like the OPs issue correctly.

There are always escalation paths, the question is if they're official, or if the front-line support isn't trusted with putting someone on it.

Yep. One job I had was to work on a team to automate the destruction of 99% of all job applications coming from the internet while still nominally being in compliance with EEOC. We figured out a number of ways.

The company actually ONLY hired people directly recommended by employees or trusted business partners. 100% of all unsolicited resumes were ignored and destroyed (yet had a paper trial for legal and EEOC compliance).

that employer is part of the reason job hunting is so miserable

It felt unfair to the employee offering to help. They (probably) have no control over LinkedIn customer support.

It looked like trying to scoring internet points at the expense of the person offering help.

Those go to /dev/null like all major tech company regular customer support channels.

I think a more interesting question is why you are shocked that in large organizations getting to the people who can change things is often difficult. This is not a problem unique to linkedin.

We shouldn't be punishing the gear on the cog that is helping turn the machine in the direction it needs to go.

Turning HN into a support forum for Google, Microsoft, etc does not improve their customer support. It's a fast lane for those "in the know" which only entrenches the problems with their existing channels.

If you want to be a bureaucrat about it, sure. This is a Tell HN post, so someone from LI commenting on it is exactly the desired outcome.

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