What Happens When You Swear At Your Users
blog.fetchnotes.com
blog.fetchnotes.com
We've had a debug message or two slip through to production, and the conversation that follows is never comfortable. The inevitable conclusion they reach is that if we miss one small thing, we're likely to miss another. Sometimes you really do have to sweat the small stuff.
I've been worried for the last five years that I don't send enough email. After having worked closely with some clients who have figured things out, this strikes me as less "a missed opportunity" and more "an oversight as glaring as being unable to spell SEO." They get tremendous value out of connecting with their customers on a semi-regular basis, and (this part truly blows my email-hating-spam-squashing mind) so do their customers.
Always, always use plain, non-offensive vanilla boilerplate text in everything you do.
Fake data, like John Doe, San Francisco, CA, doesn't share these problems.
Also of course example.com. Not sure if there are non routeable physical addresses.
Santa Claus, North Pole, Snow Street 1
Sherlock Holmes, London, 221B Baker Street (is a small museum afaik)
I'm a fan of "Bilbo Baggins, 1 Bagshot Row, Bag End", personally.
That address does not exist, but any mail addressed to it is redirected to the Museum, which is technically 239 Baker Street (since it sits between 237 and 241).
They do have a special dispensation from the City of Westminster to display their address as 221b Baker Street though.
http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/index.php
They even have an API to automatically fetch a bunch of data.
Then the very important finance guy and the very important communication lady from whatever big important investor came unexpectedly and demanded the mother of all demos RIGHT NOW.
Boys, I know what it's to be embarrassed to death and to wish being an earthworm. Preferably deep underground. Like in New-Zealand.
In fact there was quite a lot of harmless material too, however I really hoped that they wouldn't ask for a keyword that would bring forbidden pictures, or worse, ask to use the mouse themselves! I think we managed to avoid any incident this time; however a little later the boss discovered what was in there and he wasn't happy.
When I was young, I sometimes couldn't resist the urge to put strong wording in comments, like:
// This sucks, use a better data structure for it!
So, nowadays I use a better commenting style for bad code and tech debts, always with a motivation along it:
// TODO: This datastructure is probably inadquate
// here because of O(N^2) lookupExample 1: //FIXME: This code is shit, someone make it better.
Example 2: //FIXME: This code is a truly atrocious hack to work around $issue. I don't know of a better way, but suggestions welcome.
//FIXME: This code is a shitty hack to work around $issue. I don't know of a better way, but suggestions welcome.
That entirely depends on your work environment. Will adding in obscenities will rouse up some big HR kerfuffle? Then don't do it, you're just wasting everyone's time. Otherwise, do whatever you want.
# This comment included for the benefit of those grepping for swear words: shit.
I think it was a good reminder.
I resisted and uploaded the test image again. Later that day, I was called and informed that a recent change to one of the server components was mixing up sessions and the client was seeing the test image instead of the image they expected. Needless to say, I was grateful for the restraint earlier that day. I probably would have been fired if the client had seen what I had almost put up instead of the test image.
I have also accidentally overwritten a whole column in a development database with a comment about skateboards. This was obviously not a big deal since it was a dev db, but it's just more reinforcement that as boring as it gets to write completely innocuous, repetitive stuff in fields while testing, it is much better than letting something slip through in frustration and getting fired and/or losing customers over it.
Like hard drive failure and other inevitabilities, it's not a question of if your dummy data will eventually be exposed to people not meant to see it, but when.
I think it comes down to coders being much more able to traverse levels of abstraction quickly. For us, "Asscock Asscocksson" is just tag for <loremipsum>, whereas non-coders may get tripped up on that and not be able to just skip past it.
I've switched to animals. Yeah, it's a bit ridiculous coming from some giant leaps in profanity and the implied sexual/violent imagery. But, animals are funny, cute, and have a very large base of context to work with.
I can shove a panda image as a test anywhere, and if I screw up, hey, it's not so bad, it's a cute panda. Some people will ping you if you screw up, no matter how small; that can't be helped. But there's a large range of screw-ups that are recoverable, and a cute panda/kitten/monkey image really helps.
After I left, people stopped using it. They decided that strings like "jounce-visit", "crotch-surges", and "rubble-rump" (all real examples from a single run of it just now) were just a little too memorable, to the point of distracting one's mind from the code during development.
for more or less the same reason, some mail system (maybe Andrew?) used to generate Message-IDs without using vowels, and Google Chrome generates extension IDs using random strings from only the first half of the alphabet.
If you are trying to build a brand around it, great. Make a conscious decision and go with it. But doing it to be funny, "just amongst the team", has a nasty way of biting you.
Am I missing something?
Setup is unable to locate a suitable version of DirectX on your machine. You will need to install DirectX before you can use LiveArt98, dumbass!
That's a great point. Sometimes the profanity thing can actually be a part of your brand / identity, and you just accept that you'll lose some people over it, but you're banking that the benefit is worth it. I've often said that I want Fogbeam Labs to be "The Motley Crue of software companies," so something like this would not be a big deal to us. We want to be known for breaking the rules, saying "fuck it" and being a bit edgy. But that path clearly isn't for everybody. \m/
Edit: Interestingly enough, come from Britain, i think something like this would fair worse of in the UK. I think we're a little more 'stiff' than our US counterparts.
Sure, until you've had a few pints in you! Then you lot are apt to do anything...
Or maybe I just read too much "Bastard Operator from Hell."
This, to me, is the key takeaway from all this. That "false formality" is a killer, IMO. I personally try very hard to avoid it when writing Fogbeam Labs stuff, like our blog[1], but it's SOOO easy to slip into that mode. Keeping that out and maintaining a "real" conversational tone is tough, but I believe it's better in the long run. (No, I haven't A/B tested this or anything, it's just a hunch).
Halfway down the homepage it says, "Don’t Change: Use Fetchnotes with Google Apps, Evernote, Outlook and all the other services you already love." Which was a great reminder that I already have a ton of other services trying to get me to keep notes in them... what's different about Fetchnotes and why isn't this plastered all over the homepage?
/unsolicited feedback
http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/images/acidiot.g...
That makes me worried that tomorrow you'll accidentally send out another email leaking my details, or something similar.
I'm glad you didn't suffer too much for this small error, but the small errors can have big consequences.
Maybe I've been on the internet for too long and have become too skeptical.
This makes me wonder if by now there is an entire generation of tech entrepreneurs that has never read the Cluetrain Manifesto: http://www.cluetrain.com/
I was once part of a team who accidentally sent a communication where we updated our privacy policy, stating specifically that we would never share your email address with anyone.
Sounds normal right? The catch is, we sent it to 1000 people per batch, and rather than bcc'ing everyone, we used the "to" field. Whoops? Luckily we caught the issue after the first batch, i have no idea to this day how it slipped through QA however.
Similar result however, people didn't like it but many just wanted to point it out to us (and we did our best at saying sorry) I totally got where they were coming from, however we're human and life went back to normal eventually. Lesson learned!
I guess they didn't read what's inside or didn't bother.
Then our client came and the BAs gave demo to them, using my XML file (I didn't know if they're going to use that!). The client were very upset with it.
Alex Schiff, co-founder and CEO of Fetchnotes here (and author of this post). The quality of discussion on the things we post to Hacker News never ceases to amaze us! I just wanted to point out that we posted an invite link by which 1000 people can get access to our beta on the blog post itself. You can also get in directly with this link:
www.fetchnotes.com/invite/blogpost
Thanks!
Naturally, after reading the post, I went to check what fetchnotes is all about and... could not figure it after 30 seconds of scanning the homepage and left.
Anyone else had that problem?
For startups, most of the time bad press is just plain bad.
No surprise when startups shoot themselves in the foot because the hiring director is a codehead who does not see the value in a sysadmin who cannot double as a dev or who is over 45 years old.
Not the end of the world for me, I can copy from the address bar but I wonder if you're missing out on conversions.
Cool story though. I got a kick out of the customer responding back "...bitches"
Hope the traffic sticks for your team
Unlike some of the other commenters below, I don't think it's an issue of whether you have a "sense of humor" or not. YMMV.
What would you think if you received a similar email from Apple or Google?
"Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Thank you once again,
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby"
Interestingly enough, going by industry statistics, chances are in this case whoever was meant to read it were men.
That was my point: the intended offense is partly in feminizing the man, as if being feminine is bad in itself.
A developer might feel slighted at being compared to a manager. Likewise a manager might feel slighted at being compared to a developer. Both might have arguments about why a developer or a manager is better/different/more awesome, but the underlying slur isn't a global condemnation of either developers or managers, but that as a group of X you're trying to be more like other X and not like Y. So being told that you're Y is in fact saying you've failed at being X.
In other words, it's not misogynist if a man feels insulted by being feminized, just like a woman might feel slighted by being forcefully masculinized (sp?).
"Bitch" is a loaded sexist term, much like the "N-word" is a loaded racist term. There's really never a good reason to use it when you can use something else instead. And just because some people do use it doesn't mean you have to sink to their level when there's a thousand other words you could use.
If you want to raise a point based on the word nigger, use it in full. Saying N-word forces the reader to translate, which is jerkish.
In reference to your point, bitch is not a sexist word in modern slang.