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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

If your users need to resort to HN comments (or Twitter or Reddit or etc) to get a support issue fixed, something is definitely wrong with the pipeline. How many of your users out there have issues, but do not happen to see a random comment thread where someone from your team is participating.

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Mistakes inevitably happen at scale. Sometimes they’re not caught by traditional channels. What I try and encourage is our leaders to take responsibility and fix them wherever they see them. Which is what John did above.

Which is appreciated - emailed!

I already passed it on to the team. Sorry you've had this difficulty.

If the support side of things isn't scaling the same way the technology is, then maybe the whole business isn't "scaling". You can't just make one side work and then throw your hands up in the air and say, well, it's just too many user to have proper support. I mean, that's how it works but it's not how it should work.

What a weird take.

"What I try and encourage is our leaders to take responsibility and fix them wherever they see them."

Is kinda the opposite of "throw your hands up in the air".

Not sure how you got there.

"Whereever they see them" implies to me that it's not a systematic solution that is ever able to scale unless they scale their "leadership" the same way.

I don't think "wherever they see them" is the entire solution to scaling. I'd imagine that they have a whole system in place - an imperfect one because all systems are - that includes more than one part of it. That is "leadership fixes issues wherever they see them" is an component the system, not the system as a whole.

Even if you saw all the "cf fucked up" tweets/posts/etc, you still couldn't make that assertion without knowledge of all the times they didn't fuck up. People are far more likely to make noise about issues than things just working. This assertion is like assuming the starbucks corporation is incapable of producing a coffee people will buy because you saw a couple tweets about a messed up order.

Good corporate non-answer.

There is a big difference between mistakes due to an individual and mistakes due to systemic issues, which is what GP was referring to.

> If your users need to resort to HN....

True - but if a user resorting to HN receives a very positive, public reply from their CxO within 2 minutes...that's a pretty favorable sign overall.

(And even if jgrahamc does nothing except fix this n=1 problem, his brighter underlings are likely scrambling to minimize recurrences.)

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