6 ms·
One year in #stripe
- Cieplak 11y agoI'm skeptical of the data backing the language popularity chart because there is no mention of Python. It seems unlikely that Python devs never come into the IRC support channel. Ranked by general usage rather than by number of support requests, I might guess that Python would be ranked similarly to Ruby.
- mastazi 11y agoI found that very strange too.
- matthewarkin 11y agoYeah, to my recollection I can't recall a single person joining the irc room with a python code base, I can't really say why or why not, but it should be noted that it is popularity in terms of support, not in terms of api requests. The naive interpretation would be that people using stripe with a python codebase in general need less technical support with the integration.
- cperciva 11y agoMy logs have quite a few people talking about using python, but most of them are in 2013. Shifting demographics, perhaps?
- metafunctor 11y agoWe have a Python codebase, it just wasn't relevant to the couple of questions I've asked on #stripe, so didn't even mention it. The Stripe Python library + Stripe's API docs are pretty good, and never really had any issues on that level.
- rhubarbquid 11y agoI've been doing contract work for a company that uses Python and Stripe, so I found that surprising too.
- h8trswana8 11y agoStripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email to support@stripe.com, and then the waiting begins. For a service that is critical to the day-to-day functioning of a small business, their support process is unacceptable. When a critical payment issue arises, there is no phone number to call and no ticket escalation process to let you know that your issue is being worked on. We finally moved off Stripe because their support process added too much risk to our business. I know Stripe gets a lot of love from this community. But these SV businesses need to learn that customer experience goes deeper than having a flashy UI and easy-to-read integration docs.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAs along as enough customers are happy with the service as-is, their business will continue to do well.
- SnowCrash2829 11y agoWhat kind of payment issues do you encounter?
- gspleen 11y agoMy team received similar support recently. Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty. I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey. Once I read into that a bit more their support delays, lost emails, and shoddy advice all made a lot more sense.
- michaelschade 11y agoHey, sorry you had a bad experience. We have a dedicated support team that helps with the majority of questions. Like you say, folks from throughout the company do answer support questions directly too sometimes. The most common case for this is engineers that help out with products they just launched. They have the best answers and can make changes to the product directly in response to feedback; we've found the support quality there is really good. I'd like to learn more about where we fell short in your case. Could you forward any of the emails to me at michael@stripe.com? And if you have any other thoughts—about this or Stripe as a whole—I'd love to hear them as well!
- nathancahill 11y ago> 430 hours writing messages or about 11 work weeks. (Hey Stripe guys, where can I send an invoice?) But really, someone at Stripe should cut him a check. I've always thought markin was part of the Stripe team. The IRC room is pretty much the closest thing to support that Stripe has (still no public phone number, ticket system?), and he's the lifeblood of it.
- wingerlang 11y ago> if each took on average 1 minute to compose This is IRC though, so I guess the average message would take more like ~seconds to compose. Not counting "research" etc.
- nathancahill 11y agoYeah, and want to guess how long you'd have to have someone on staff to hit 430 hours of IRC messaging? A lot longer than 11 weeks, that's for sure. "Research" is what takes time. You sound like my grandparents. "What's hard about your work, you just type on the computer all day!" they say. The easy part is typing. The hard part is knowing which keys to press.
- wingerlang 11y agoActually it would take 11 weeks for a staffed member to do that 8 hours a day for 11 work weeks. And I understand the mechanics, I just think it was worded in a way where it sounded like he clocked the actual writing of messages, and doing that 1 minute per message would be a lot.
- matthewarkin 11y agoI estimated 1 minute to roughly include research and reproduction time. The week estimation was then based on a 40 work week
- wingerlang 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fillskills 11y agoMatt, you helped me a few days ago. Thought you were part of Stripe support. So glad that our questions match your favorite type of queries and that you were there when we were in a crunch.