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Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services
by cgb223 9y ago
Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume. This could result in the inability to buy or sell for periods of time. Despite ongoing increases in our support capacity, our customer support response times may be delayed, especially for requests that do not involve immediate risks to customer account security. You can read more in our Coinbase User Agreement.
This is the problem they should be solving, not avoiding with blog posts
- linkregister 9y agoI agree they should solve the problem. It's pretty embarrassing. Do you think it might be reasonable that they do both? The time to publish a blog post is probably about 4 employee-hours, including management review. Getting more servers, provisioning them, adding them to pools, rebalancing, and deploying code takes more time and engineers.
- otp124 9y agoWell, interviewing competent, trustworthy people who provide valuable services to your business takes more time than server provisioning. I haven’t done the math, but I’d estimate I spend 20-25 hours of reading resumes, interviewing, and follow-ups per successful hire. And that’s multiplied by the 6-8 other people involved. Edit: Elsewhere I read coinbase said they would hire 400 support folks — so 25 hours x7 involved staff, x400=70,000 hours
- Cakez0r 9y agoI'm sure they're doing everything in their power to increase their availability. I like that they're giving a heads up to their users in the interim.
- xadhominemx 9y agoJust a wild guess but I'd imagine they're probably doing both
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoBecause we all know that an entire company can, at a given time, either write blog posts or solve infrastructural issues, never both.
- banachtarski 9y ago+1. I hate unreasonable armchair CEOs.
- cgb223 9y agoYou're completely missing my point Its not that they can do one or the other (they can), its that they aren't doing the latter. This problem with getting frozen up whenever theres major volatility has existed for years on Coinbase
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoThen please say that instead of making unnecessary snarks about blog posts. Any company with even a small marketing / PR team probably has people whose job IS writing blog posts, and who can't go around solving infra problems.
- cgb223 9y agoNot sure where this hostility is coming from I'm sorry you're having a bad day, please dont take it out on me
- thephyber 9y agoAs a former developer at a social media company that saw both the need for improved availability and messaging to users, I have no complaints about this post. Unlike most social media platforms, CoinBase users can easily move their money/BTC to another rival exchange, so CoinBase is right to address the concerns of people, not just their technical shortcomings. Users can easily rile each other up in a tizzy when one user comes up with a (sometimes) plausibly sounding conspiracy theory and others latch onto it. Some on HN were doing this yesterday. I think it's fair that CoinBase remind their users that they are still growing and trying to keep up pace with the demand to buy into the BTC market, which has been experiencing a hockey-stick growth for over a year now.
- dawhizkid 9y agoTheir support org is far too small for their user base
- mentat 9y agoYes, "don't take positions that require our exchange to be up" isn't exactly what you want from a provider of financial services.