4 ms·

I would bet that reselling a camera was treated as a corner case and the ticket was probably sitting on the backlog somewhere.

reaperducer 7y ago
Or just dismissed outright. It's very common see FAANG employees on HN labeling user concerns "edge cases" and blowing them off.
- justinjlynn 7y ago
  This angers me... edge cases are where people get cut... and badly! If anything, they should have more attention paid to them than less. Incentive structures inside these orgs are poorly designed to account for this, however. Trouble is, I don't know a good way to do modify them to do so without introducing even worse perverse incentives.
  - chairmanwow 7y ago
    This is definitely a corner case and the amount of such corner cases balloon into numbers difficult to boggle quickly. I agree this is an egregious miss, but absolutely understandable from an engineers perspective. I’m sure no one is happy with this outcome.
    - justinjlynn 7y ago
      Upper/executive management certainly were happy... of course, until it bit the company in the ass. Engineering time not spent handling what would happen when a customer becomes not a customer is development/engineering time spent making features for sales to tout instead of making sure the product was safe for people they no longer thought they had a reason to care about. Reputational risk is really poorly handled because it's such a nebulous problem - and now, hopefully they'll see a massive drop in new customer acquisition and existing customer usage or they'll have absolutely no reason to care at all.
  - burgerboy 7y ago
    Wow dude your projects must have unlimited resources and just be perfect eh?
- bartread 7y ago
  Is it really that common? FAANG have millions to billions of users/customers. Can you at least cite some examples, please? If you're FAANG-like and have 100M users an edge case that only affects 1% of customers still affects 1M people. Something that affects 0.1% still hits 100,000. Even at 0.01% you've still infuriated a small town's worth of people. I'd hope that the average FAANG employee is smart/aware enough to realise that even edge and corner cases represent significant problems, even if all you care about is PR. (Although worth thinking about what might happen if you're Netflix and all these people decide to cancel subscriptions.) (Incidentally, there's one plausible and recent example I'm aware of: issues with Macbook Pro butterfly keyboards.)
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Although worth thinking about what might happen if you're Netflix and all these people decide to cancel subscriptions. Probably not much. The thing is, from business POV, deprioritizing edge cases can be a rational choice. It depends on how much the impact of an edge case is amplified. At the very base, if you piss off 0.01% of your users, you lose 0.01% of your revenue, which is not much and can be ignored. However, if that 0.01% can get a Twitter shitstorm rolling to the point it reaches mainstream media, suddenly the damage may be far greater. WRT. examples - any time myself or someone else mentions that a piece of software is designed to prevent productive/efficient use of it, or loses such a feature, you can see responses that amount to "power users are small minority, why would one care about them". The annoying thing is (besides showing the disrespect to other people's time), this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't leave room for user to get better at using your software, they will never get better at using it and you won't have power users.
    - bartread 7y ago
      That's true w.r.t. power user examples, and I agree that it's infuriating, but OTOH I tend to assume the people making such comments are just parroting ideas. I'm certainly not convinced they're all FAANG employees, as suggested by the comment I was responding to.
Scoundreller 7y ago
Had a similar experience with an old set-top-box: a Boxee. The new owner couldn’t add Netflix to it until the old owner removed their “sync”, even though the old owner wasn’t a subscriber anymore!
supergirl 7y ago
reselling might not be common but returning is, at least in europe. you could install the camera but then decide to return it.

reaperducer 7y ago

Or just dismissed outright. It's very common see FAANG employees on HN labeling user concerns "edge cases" and blowing them off.

justinjlynn 7y ago
This angers me... edge cases are where people get cut... and badly! If anything, they should have more attention paid to them than less. Incentive structures inside these orgs are poorly designed to account for this, however. Trouble is, I don't know a good way to do modify them to do so without introducing even worse perverse incentives.
- chairmanwow 7y ago
  This is definitely a corner case and the amount of such corner cases balloon into numbers difficult to boggle quickly. I agree this is an egregious miss, but absolutely understandable from an engineers perspective. I’m sure no one is happy with this outcome.
  - justinjlynn 7y ago
    Upper/executive management certainly were happy... of course, until it bit the company in the ass. Engineering time not spent handling what would happen when a customer becomes not a customer is development/engineering time spent making features for sales to tout instead of making sure the product was safe for people they no longer thought they had a reason to care about. Reputational risk is really poorly handled because it's such a nebulous problem - and now, hopefully they'll see a massive drop in new customer acquisition and existing customer usage or they'll have absolutely no reason to care at all.
- burgerboy 7y ago
  Wow dude your projects must have unlimited resources and just be perfect eh?
bartread 7y ago
Is it really that common? FAANG have millions to billions of users/customers. Can you at least cite some examples, please? If you're FAANG-like and have 100M users an edge case that only affects 1% of customers still affects 1M people. Something that affects 0.1% still hits 100,000. Even at 0.01% you've still infuriated a small town's worth of people. I'd hope that the average FAANG employee is smart/aware enough to realise that even edge and corner cases represent significant problems, even if all you care about is PR. (Although worth thinking about what might happen if you're Netflix and all these people decide to cancel subscriptions.) (Incidentally, there's one plausible and recent example I'm aware of: issues with Macbook Pro butterfly keyboards.)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Although worth thinking about what might happen if you're Netflix and all these people decide to cancel subscriptions. Probably not much. The thing is, from business POV, deprioritizing edge cases can be a rational choice. It depends on how much the impact of an edge case is amplified. At the very base, if you piss off 0.01% of your users, you lose 0.01% of your revenue, which is not much and can be ignored. However, if that 0.01% can get a Twitter shitstorm rolling to the point it reaches mainstream media, suddenly the damage may be far greater. WRT. examples - any time myself or someone else mentions that a piece of software is designed to prevent productive/efficient use of it, or loses such a feature, you can see responses that amount to "power users are small minority, why would one care about them". The annoying thing is (besides showing the disrespect to other people's time), this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't leave room for user to get better at using your software, they will never get better at using it and you won't have power users.
  - bartread 7y ago
    That's true w.r.t. power user examples, and I agree that it's infuriating, but OTOH I tend to assume the people making such comments are just parroting ideas. I'm certainly not convinced they're all FAANG employees, as suggested by the comment I was responding to.

Scoundreller 7y ago

Had a similar experience with an old set-top-box: a Boxee. The new owner couldn’t add Netflix to it until the old owner removed their “sync”, even though the old owner wasn’t a subscriber anymore!

supergirl 7y ago

reselling might not be common but returning is, at least in europe. you could install the camera but then decide to return it.