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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I feel like others lose opportunities by not doing the same. By publishing early and publishing the details they: keep the company in the news with positive stuff (free ad), get an internal documentation of the incident (ignoring the customer oriented "we're sorry" part), effectively get a free recruitment post (you're reading this because you're in tech and we do cool stuff, wink), release some internal architecture info that people will reference in discussions later. At a certain size it feels stupid not to post them publicly. I wonder how much those posts are calculated and how much organic/culture related.

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I agree that this is a free ad/recruitment. However, it’s easy to see how more conservative businesses see this as a risk. They are highlighting their deficiencies, letting their big important clients know that human error can bring their network down.

Additionally, these post-mittens work for Cloudflare because they have a great reputation and good uptime. If this were happening daily or weekly, it would be a warning sign to customers.

It’s a strategy other companies could adopt, but to do it effectively requires changes all across the organization.

OTOH, I think most actual engineers would know that everywhere has deficiencies and can be brought down by human error, and I'd personally rather use a product where the people running it admit this rather than just claim that their genius engineers made it 100% foolproof and nothing could ever possibly go wrong

Absolutely. The first step of good SRE is admitting (publicly and within the organization) that you have a problem.

100% agree. But…

1. On the buy side, crappy big companies with procurement etc. may not have “actual engineers” deciding things. Maybe for something like Cloudflare that’s likely to sit within an actual technical team’s mandate

2. Not 100% foolproof but if a startup is selling its tool and has an uptime page and details of all its downtime and as a prospective customer you go and see that they have 3-4 hour downtimes once or twice a month, it should raise alarm bells.

>I feel like others lose opportunities by not doing the same

IMO it is a slippery slope to see this as opportunity too strongly. Sure, doing the right thing may be net beneficial to the business in the long run...but the $RIGHT_THING should be done first and foremost because it's the right thing.

I believe Marcus Aurelius had something similar to say on the matter. :-)

quodcumque erat ?

Ehhhh… I think it’s good (for us) that they do this, but I don’t think it’s a free ad (contrary to popular belief, not all news is good news, and this is bad news) and any sort of conversion rate on recruitment is probably vanishingly small (which would normally be fine, but incidents like these may turn off some actual customers, which is where actual revenue comes from).

I think their calculation (to the extent you can call it that) is that in the interest of PR and damage control, it’s better to get a thorough postmortem out quickly to stem the bleeding and keep people like us from going “I can’t wait to hear what happened at Cloudflare” for a week. Now we know, the customers have an explanation, and this bad news cycle has a higher chance of ending quickly.

> but incidents like these may turn off some actual customers

Incidents - yes. But why would a post-mortem turn someone off? The incident happened regardless. Do you think anyone would be more likely turned off by reading how they solved it / plan to prevent it on the future than by silence?

> I wonder how much those posts are calculated and how much organic/culture related.

Don't companies have a fiduciary duty to calculate things; the reason for doing something actually cannot just be that it's a nice thing to do? Not down to the word, but at least the general decision to be this way?

No they don't have such duty. In practice very little decision making is based on hard data in my experience. Real world being fuzzy and risk being hard to quantify do not help the situation.

No.

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?http...

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