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i will provide an opposing viewpoint which i'm sure many people do not agree with. if a service i use is down, all i want is an acknowledgement and that "we ar

i will provide an opposing viewpoint which i'm sure many people do not agree with. if a service i use is down, all i want is an acknowledgement and that "we are working on it right now with high priority". i want all available resources to be fixing the problem. my anxiety over powerlessness in relying on others during a crisis manifests in other ways, like figuring out why i'm at the mercy of this thing in the first place, and putting alternatives in place. but during the crisis i'll just go do something else for an hour and then read the post mortem when it comes out.

robryk 10y ago
Updates that are communicated are not the details of what's happening in the investigation, but things that are expected to be useful to users/clients. They are things such as the estimated time for problem resolution, updates on the scope of the problem (e.g. "this is an instrumentation problem" vs "this is an actual outage") or mitigation steps that could be applied by the clients. It is often very useful to know such things during an outage.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  i don't think anyone, anywhere would have given you an accurate estimated figure of nearly 5 hours to fix this problem. furthermore, even if you somehow could divine the future, telling the customer that you think an outage will last over half a working day is going to turn an extremely shitty situation into something even worse.
barkingcat 10y ago
sometimes the resources available are suitable for different problems. I consider high quality communicators to be a significant resource, and the problem to solve is to make sure everyone affected has the right information to make their next decision to mitigate the issue. These communicators might not know how to solve the actual technical problem, and it'd be like putting monkeys on a typewriter to tell them to "all hands in fixing a configuration issue with the web server" for example. I'd say apply the right people to the right problems.
vacri 10y ago
Keeping the affected users informed is part of 'fixing the problem'. Sometimes the problem is even something that some users will be able to work around if they know what it is.

robryk 10y ago

Updates that are communicated are not the details of what's happening in the investigation, but things that are expected to be useful to users/clients. They are things such as the estimated time for problem resolution, updates on the scope of the problem (e.g. "this is an instrumentation problem" vs "this is an actual outage") or mitigation steps that could be applied by the clients. It is often very useful to know such things during an outage.

beachstartup 10y ago
i don't think anyone, anywhere would have given you an accurate estimated figure of nearly 5 hours to fix this problem. furthermore, even if you somehow could divine the future, telling the customer that you think an outage will last over half a working day is going to turn an extremely shitty situation into something even worse.

barkingcat 10y ago

sometimes the resources available are suitable for different problems. I consider high quality communicators to be a significant resource, and the problem to solve is to make sure everyone affected has the right information to make their next decision to mitigate the issue. These communicators might not know how to solve the actual technical problem, and it'd be like putting monkeys on a typewriter to tell them to "all hands in fixing a configuration issue with the web server" for example. I'd say apply the right people to the right problems.

vacri 10y ago

Keeping the affected users informed is part of 'fixing the problem'. Sometimes the problem is even something that some users will be able to work around if they know what it is.