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Comment by summraznboi | Hacker News Reader

We do currently only do email support, but we respond to each email quickly and in a personable manner. We also have a process to check every single transaction that occurs to make sure that no extreme or inconsistent charges occur. And sorry about the captcha on the website; we are still growing rapidly better fulfill the transportation needs of New York!

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Even if you don't do support via phone, you should have a phone number so one can get an actual human being in realtime interaction in case your system gets so fucked up that normal procedures break down.

As far as i'm concerned you're not a company that takes business seriously if i can't call you.

And this is echoed by many people i know, even though we prefer most of our communication to be online.

so according to you, GitHub isn't a serious business?

You're using different words than i wrote, so i can't tell if we're talking about the same thing. I wrote "not a company that takes business seriously". What does "serious business" mean?

That said, assuming you intended to say the same thing i did:

While Github are by and large nice people who found a good way to help people and make money with it, they do not take their business seriously.

In the past my experience has been that in cases which involve systemic issues with their entire design, or bugs exhibited on their website but involving third-party software (i.e. hard problems) their responses have been:

  * workarounds instead of even considering an investigation into change
    (even when they cause problems for OS projects due to no action of
    said project whatsoever)
  * invitations to fix the third-party software they chose
  * flat out refusal to even look at bugs in their website because they
    don't support older browsers (see Opera 12 vs. 15+)

Lastly, i'm a paying customer. Nothing i do with Git involving my lifelihood or anything remotely serious depends on Github, because in a case of emergency i cannot even have a reasonable expectation of aid from them. I'll happily use and recommend their service and gladly pay them, but only with the caveat that they take things about as seriously as a bunch of guys on a hiking trip. †

† http://octobeer.me/

Just a question, what bearing does a custom kegerator have on their business?

The fact that they built this into their office makes it very clear that they have a quite laissez-faire attitude towards their business.

How does that follow? Do you consider any company who has a hackathon to also have a laissez-faire attitude towards business? Since obviously the stuff built there isn't directly contributing to their bottom line.

There's a lot of aspects of Github I think you could use as an example (and you do) but the existence of a kegerator or alcohol in the office isn't really a good one.

> Do you consider any company who has a hackathon to also have a laissez-faire attitude towards business? Since obviously the stuff built there isn't directly contributing to their bottom line.

Out of sheer curiosity, can you show me examples of hackathons held that don't directly contribute to a company's bottom line?

More importantly though: You're making the mistake of thinking that me saying "they don't take business seriously" means "they're bad at making money". This is not the case, and github is exceptionally good at making money, which is why they don't actually need to take business seriously.

Come on with the phone number zealotry. It's very hard as a rapidly growing small-medium sized business to provide great phone service (on the level of being able to fix random problems on the spot), and if you can't provide great phone service, it's generally better to stick to asynchronous online methods where you can provide better service.

I'm not sure if my post wasn't clear enough. Let me try and rephrase:

It's fine to deny phone support by default and demand usage of online tools. However if you don't provide a phone number for emergencies and cases where you fucked up, you don't take business seriously.

Doesn't mean i think you shouldn't do business. Simply means i won't trust you with anything remotely important.

The trouble with providing a phone number which is only intended for emergencies is that customers will learn that they can call it for ANYTHING. And woe to the company that says "That doesn't sound very serious! This number is only for emergencies, can you please send us an email? Bye now."

That's a matter of bad training.

No. The situation of any phone support professional who is under management pressure to both provide quality service and filter out "unimportant" requests is untenable. The quality of support will end up sucking.

The "serious problem phone support only" thing is a nice, MBAish compromise idea that won't work well. Everyone thinks their problems are serious. The way to make this work is to provide a phone support number AND to make the web- and app-based support tools work so well customers won't feel a need to call it very often.

I don't agree with your first statement, but i'm totally fine with your conclusion.

If you provide a phone number for emergencies, it will be used for non-emergencies by the most irritating kind of customer (`every problem of mine is an emergency!').

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