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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

It might not be a willingness issue as much as a bandwidth issue.

Bandwidth can be bought with money, of which Microsoft made an extra $133.7 billion this year.

We know that coding agents have been pushing GH to its limits. Scaling is hard - especially staff. Maybe they aren't trying to scale support but I think it's reasonable to give them the benefit of doubt here, given what we know publicly

Microsoft is not some plucky upstart company with 12 employees and an unexpectedly popular product. We do not, in fact, need to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

From having worked at abd four startups and massive companies, the company being massive actually might make some things harder.

Like, philosophically? Because companies on Microsoft's scale can move heaven and earth to accomplish whatever they please regardless of difficulty. If it's difficult that just means it costs more money. Microsoft is planning to put ML infrastructure in space, but you're saying that building a support org, which Microsoft is very familiar with, is too hard because they're so big?

Having "hackers" on this site giving the benefit of doubt to companies clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year will never cease to stop being ironic to me...

On the site run by a VC firm? Why is that a shock? Besides, hacker does not mean being a kneejerking reactionary against corporations.

I don't think you understand the website if you think this is some revelation. The people here are social climbing demons who will earn their reward in hell. But the term hackers is apt, they are hacks and are hacking their soul to pieces. If only you or I had courage to actually do something other than to make snide remarks at their expense. Introspection is almost as bad as ambition.

This is one of the things I dislike the most about large tech companies. They get way more customers than they can adequately provide support/moderation for and either offer no support or shitty automated support. Then when something falls through the cracks people always go "what do you expect them to do, hire enough people?" Yeah I do!

That’s a self-inflicted issue they should have properly planned for.

They aren't trying to scale support. If anything, they are trying to throw AI at the problem. The support team is understaffed and overwhelmed.

You’re saying this is a problem money can’t solve?

There’s no need for benefit of the doubt when it comes to the level of support provided by tech companies.

Bad support by tech companies is a conscious profit-preserving choice.

They have to dump all that free cash into data centers, sorry

Never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft is elite.

Sounds like they can afford elite customer support.

I have for a long time said that the way to regulate these huge companies would be to have government-mandated SLOs for live support.

For example (simplified), if a user makes a call, a person with sufficient privileges to handle 90% of the cases should answer on the other end within 2 minutes. If the case cannot be handled, the higher-up with privileges to handle 99% of the cases should be reached within 5 minutes. And to be fair, it should be mandated for all companies, not only FAANG-like.

But a company like Meta (for example) with a billion customers would then have to decide whether they want to work on quality improvements for their services or whether they would like to hire a million technical support staff.

If users value support so much, you should start a competitor with excellent support. I suspect though that very few users are willing to pay the additional cost.

Once in a while support is truly needed around the less frequently used paths in the system but impossible to reach. Most users don't need it, but those comparatively few that do really value it. Problem is, these companies are so entrenched, in some cases there is literally nowhere else to go.

Abuse reports aren't even done by users. That's a classical externality.

Good thing HN provided them some bandwidth to do their jobs.

unwilling to provide proper support?

Just seems like a silly rational response to the same problem.

Yes,evidently bandwidth from HN unblocks takedown requests of malicious content.

Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies. I guarantee you that once an issue hits the HN front page, even engineers who might have totally different talks will get involved. (Never worked at GH or have talked to anyone there in years but this is how everything works pretty much everywhere)

> Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies.

Yes, indeed public awareness of a problem affects how an issue is reprioritized. Some companies even employ web scrapers to do sentiment analysis at each release, and visible issues do get bumped to high priority.

It's amusing how some people in this thread try to pretend this doesn't happen, and make these bold assertions with a straight face in replies to people who were in actual meetings where issues were escalated because of this.

The public shaming will continue until the internal incentives improve. Make sure to drop that HN thread link into the internal task tracker y'all. Don't forget to report to journalists if the severity warrants it (Brian Krebs, 404media, etc).

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."

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