4 ms·

As usual people are taking a comment and twisting it any old way they'd like. Which is fine, that's why we have these communications. To start off, no I am not

As usual people are taking a comment and twisting it any old way they'd like. Which is fine, that's why we have these communications. To start off, no I am not in aviation. I have run quite a few companies and development departments. I am not suggesting Slack or anyone else should not communicate at all when they have an outage. A public postmortem, which many people are asking for, is one method. Is it the most effective method? I doubt it. Many people are suggesting that as paying customers they would like to know what happened. Does a public postmortem tell the paying customer what happened in an effective way? Maybe, but maybe not. When I am running a company I care very much what my paying customers think and are feeling about my service. I will communicate issues directly to them. Do I need to explain to the rest of the world in some great technical detail what happened during an incident? Absolutely not. Do I need to have the first post in Google about my company be an outage postmortem? Of course not. I need my PAYING customers to be pleased with the service I offer and to understand how I will mitigate the damage I have done to them. To me, that's a basic principle of business. I don't have to explain to everyone. I owe everything to my paying customers. Gitlab did a postmortem almost immediately after a major outage and some people tried to slaughter them with the information they shared. It was sad and unfortunate. Their openness was met with some horrible results from the community. Also, I use Slack. My company uses it for everything including ChatOps for my production environment deployment. We have a hundred of so active users. The outage this morning harmed us. But you know what? I don't pay for Slack. I owe a lot to Slack but they don't owe me anything. I can't blame them for my problems this morning. They are a free service to me. I appreciate that their absolutely free service servers my company so well almost all of the time.

isostatic 8y ago
My company does pay for slack, pays a lot, and I expect an RFO
- trcollinson 8y ago
  Excellent! If you somehow read my entire message and got out of it that Slack shouldn’t give you detail about the outage this morning, then I somehow did not portray how important it is to emplain issues and resolutions to paying customers. I hope you get a full break down and understand exactly how they will keep you from having this sort of outage again. If they don’t, then it becomes a value issue to decide whether you should move to another system. My point is only that it does not have to be a large public explanation. You, or the decision maker at your company, who pays a substantial sum of money to slack for their service, should have an explanation until you are satisfied.

isostatic 8y ago

My company does pay for slack, pays a lot, and I expect an RFO

trcollinson 8y ago
Excellent! If you somehow read my entire message and got out of it that Slack shouldn’t give you detail about the outage this morning, then I somehow did not portray how important it is to emplain issues and resolutions to paying customers. I hope you get a full break down and understand exactly how they will keep you from having this sort of outage again. If they don’t, then it becomes a value issue to decide whether you should move to another system. My point is only that it does not have to be a large public explanation. You, or the decision maker at your company, who pays a substantial sum of money to slack for their service, should have an explanation until you are satisfied.