Hacker News Reader

> Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading.

If that's the case, these companies/people have no business using cloud services. Fair enough that you might not understand the ramification, in that case you contact support. If you don't see those email... that's on you. We operate out of a number of datacenters, they all communicate via email, giving us one month to three notice regarding service windows. If we fail to plan for an outage because we didn't see an email, that's our problem. I don't know why anyone would expect more from a SaaS company.

For really large customers, I would assume that they have a customer service representative and yes that person should have called. If you're just a small customer (even if you might be big in your own mind) and just have an account that get billed to a company credit card each month, it's a little naive to think you'd get anything more than an email.

We've already seen a number SaaS company just shutting of customers for little to no reason, even AWS has done this. Running things in the cloud is a risk, and it's you job as the operations team to stay on top of things, have backup plan, because you cannot expect cloud vendors to care about some random customer who just signed up using a credit card and a nondescript email. They should, but they don't.

A good rule is: Don't expect a SaaS/cloud company to put in more effort contacting you than you did signing up.

> > Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading.

>

> If that's the case, these companies/people have no business using cloud services.

Cloud services are responsible for this. I've signed up to many cloud services where I purposefully unchecked all the newsletter/updates/... notifications.

But I still receive notifications for stuff unrelated to what I use. These emails are full of marketing/PR jargon, where it's unclear whether I'm affected by the change or whether there is even a change!

Cloud services are lazy, don't look at their customer use, spam everybody, and blame their customers when they missed an important update due to noise-fatigue.

This is the main reason why I stopped using SaaS.

Unless the cloud provider can provide proof that the person received and read such a notice, then they can still be sued for actual damages... and I'd be surprised if that doesn't happen in this case.

The fact is, there are many options from a cooldown, scream test, automated backup for migration/recovery... this organization did none of those things and absolutely deserves to lose massively as a result. This is a DATABASE as a Service... RETENTION should be one of the highest priorities.

For that matter, it would have been better if they auto-migrated in an OFF status, or otherwise backed up... just hitting the DELETE ALL DATA button is wrong. Several of the posters in the thread indicate they received no such emails.

> I was like: you guys should've FedEx'd me this in the first place. For all they knew, I wasn't getting their emails or letters in the first place because nothing had been sent signature required.

I love the scream test, but the analogy you bring up actually - this seems unfair. The cost of Fedex'ing everyone is astounding (for many businesses).

But I like the concept. Definitely a sort of "shut off the server for like an hour" and then see who yells.

Phone calls for any account that still operating on the location.

100% agreed 3 emails is... hardly anything.

The price doesn't matter in this analogy since it still mostly works

The point of the story was that if you have something critical to communicate, you can't do it using the same methods that are also used for low-priority mostly junk and expect it to be acted upon. Surely a mortgage servicing company can afford to FedEx an envelope. I wouldn't expect Influx to do so.

For that matter, registered mail is another option that isn't as expensive as fedex... there's other options that are slightly more costly, and more noticeable than sending via the same structure that junk mail goes through.

I expressly don't use automated payments for my mortgage and auto loan(s) as I don't want to have an account miss... I didn't know my mortgage was sold/changed a couple months ago until I went online to change. The same happened with an auto loan a few years back as well.

When you buy a large, registered debt such as a mortgage the cost of Fedex'ing everyone should be factored into the sale. If that's too much money you shouldn't be buying such assets. Notifying those that are affected properly would seem to be the least you can do in such situations.

Exactly and they’re find sending junk mail all the time and FedEx isn’t that expensive for large businesses like that.

At least here in Germany junk mail senders actually get reduced rates.

At the end of the day you are the one who pays for the fedex though.

Not really, no. Mortgage payments are interest and principal, not administrative fees beyond what you paid when you signed the original contract.

Whatever costs are imposed broadly an industry are covered by customers of that industry. If mortgages are more costly to buy, they’ll be more costly to originate.

The consumer doesn't bear 100% of the costs though. If mortgages cost $1mm to buy, they wouldn't cost $1mm to originate. They'd cost a little extra by being illiquid - the same amount as if they cost $2mm to buy.

The consumer nearly always bears 100% of the costs - because most companies sell at a profit.

The final price is a combination of all costs incurred + a profit percentage imposed on the consumer.

If all customers would receive fedex mail, then the costs of this fedex would be pushed on them somehow. Probably by making them pay slightly higher interest rates or by introducing some one off handling fee.

Profits aren't a fixed number.

Of course not, but financial products are priced and offered with a financial outcome (usually a margin) in mind. If you make mortgage processing more expensive, you'll find the offers for origination are worse than if mortgage processing were less expensive.

Sorry, it's a ridiculous argument. Mortgages get bought and sold all the time and clearly the buyers are on the hook for the communications costs and these do not pre-emptively get priced into future products by the sellers. I'm sure that there are situations where your argument has merit but this isn't one of those.

No one is saying that existing mortgages would be re-priced. Those are contracts and you can't unilaterally change them. What I and others are saying is that if you changed the obligations of buyers such that mortgages became more expensive to service, that those servicing cost increases would ultimately be borne by the mortgage borrowers rather than eaten by mortgage lenders out of the goodness of their hearts.

> these [communications costs] do not pre-emptively get priced into future products by the sellers

They 100% do get priced in. Whenever you buy a product, you're paying all the costs of that product. When someone originates a mortgage, they're aware of the secondary market for mortgages. If that secondary market is eroded by a significant increase in communications costs, that reduces the willingness of a secondary buyer to bid for your book of mortgages. That erosion reduces your projected profit on originating, so you take a little longer to lower your offered rate to 5.250%, or you charge a bit higher origination fee, or whatever to ensure you maintain a viable business. So long as these fees hit the entire market, the other originators are all making the same calculations.

It seems odd that you [seem to] think that money for these costs would just result in reduced profits for the financial services companies rather than in increased borrowing costs.

> What I and others are saying is that if you changed the obligations of buyers such that mortgages became more expensive to service, that those servicing cost increases would ultimately be borne by the mortgage borrowers rather than eaten by mortgage lenders out of the goodness of their hearts.

I got what you and others are saying but I've been trying - and failing, apparently - to point out that the costs for a mortgage in case of a sale are born by the buyers who are not even the same kind of institutions as the parties that sell them, and so they are in no position to charge the subjects, nor are the sellers going to price the mortgages any higher in the future because the costs aren't born by them.

There is no such thing as 'projected profits' that go into this because mortgages can be sold (and are sold) more than once, the number of times is not known when they are issued first. And it is going to be only a small fraction of the audience that is going to be hard to reach for whatever reason. The presumption that there is some kind of free market mechanism that will ultimately pass those costs back to the original mortgage underwriters is not in any way evidenced by present day mortgage prices. On the sum total of mortgages out there and the - exorbitant - profits they create for the lenders we're talking about such small amounts that it will make zero difference.

A 'significant increase in communications costs' would translate into that being something that is some noticeable percentage of the total yield over the remaining time and it just simply isn't. Typical mortgage rates and amounts utterly dwarf the costs of a one time notification, especially if you don't have to notify everybody like that, and you can try cheaper channels first until you have a hit. Besides, the original mortgage 'service charge' is already a large multiple of the various costs and tends to be mostly pure profit for the initial lender.

It seems odd that you [seem to] think that mortgages are priced such that the mere cost of communications is going to show up in the prices, they are amongst the most profitable financial products.

> On the sum total of mortgages out there and the - exorbitant - profits they create for the lenders we're talking about such small amounts that it will make zero difference.

If it made zero difference, they would Fedex the documents, but they dont.

>I love the scream test, but the analogy you bring up actually - this seems unfair. The cost of Fedex'ing everyone is astounding

I wouldn't be surprised if the cost difference is negligible, maybe a couple bucks per mortgage? FedEx bulk discounts can be pretty massive

> scream test

I didn't realize there was an actual name for this, so I'll add another for the thread that I haven't seen brought up: email is evil in operations (EIEIO, like the nursery rhyme)

I think the analogy is to station people at various floors in a big office building while you disconnect (unmarked) cables in a legacy patch panel to see who starts screaming. Then you plug it back in and label the cable...

Or the more general version, where you shutdown a server/service and see if anyone screams. If it's still silent after $days, you can decomission it.

Something similar happened to me when I lived at a condo in Boston and the management company changed and I somehow missed the memo.

I kept sending checks to the old management company for a few months before the problem was discovered. Unfortunately, someone at the old management company apparently had a bit of a gambling habit and petty-thefted that money away, and I never saw it again even though she lost in a lawsuit.

Semi-related HOA horror story:

https://abc11.com/nc-hoa-foreclose-sell-house-woman-didnt-kn...

Was the employee the defendant, not the company?

In this case, yes, it was the employee; I forgot the details as to how/why that was

You know, I don't really care that mortgages get sold, but the fact that I need to go out of my way every time to make sure I update my information in their system is astounding.

Technically that shouldn't even be your problem.

Neither should be a random third party defrauding a bank, but banks are masters at outsourcing work and responsibility onto their customers, and that's why it's called "identity theft" and suddenly I am at fault somehow.

I even (sort of) do this when I'm deprecating something which my team is the only user of, because sometimes it's hard to tell if something's really unused! First shut off the VPC access while leaving all the other infrastructure and data intact, wait a week or two and see if everything breaks, then get rid of everything else

There is another variant of this: if you can show that the code you are deleting never worked, there is no need to do a scream test. That is, if anyone cared about the code you are deleting, they would have already been screaming.

I would be careful with that. Maybe they did scream, but you haven't heard it, and they worked around the issue. Or maybe they did their workaround without saying anything. Or maybe you're wrong about your code not working. It actually may be working in some way that you don't know of, but is useful to someone.

To use an ecosystem analogy, once you expose your software to the world beyond your own dev environment, even internally, you'll eventually find that something colonized it - much like everything on this planet that isn't being actively and regularly scrubbed.

In my own career, I've seen cases of this. For example, once we were tweaking a little embedded database that supported a half-finished feature meant for internal use, and only then we (as in everyone in the dev team) learned that somehow, the QA & deployment support people got wind of it, and were scripting against exposed parts of that DB for a good year. And, it turns out, it wasn't the only part of the software that we thought of as incidental phenotype (or didn't think of at all), and the other team considered stable behavior.

See also the so-called Hyrum's Law: "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviours of your system will be depended on by somebody."

Re: Hyrum's law This is why user facing code should have (at least) two classes of tests: 1) is it doing what the developer intended it to do 2) is it doing the same thing it did on the last release version with typical user requests?

That sounds the same, but it is not.

The first class is a set of simpler "happy paths" of intended specific behaviors.

The second class is like wargaming. A good way to do this is to replay user requests against your API and see that they return the same results release to release. You may also uncover interesting unintended behavior / conversations to have with users this way.

Clearly, it's easier to say sorry than do things right up front

LOL, have they even said sorry though?

Sounds like the most cost effective way, however.