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Im sorry but this doesnt hold water when tumblr has 40 million in vc funding. If they were bootstrapped then yes maybe. But if his team is stressed out maybe

Im sorry but this doesnt hold water when tumblr has 40 million in vc funding. If they were bootstrapped then yes maybe. But if his team is stressed out maybe they could start hiring people. Instead they are causing situations like this to happen. Also im sorry but i dont care how stressed out you are. As a ceo you have a responsibility to treat your customers with respect. Especially since what the customer was asking was so simply and basic and straightforward. Its not like the emailer sent a nasty mean email calling everybody names and asking them why the service isnt working in harsh ways and being disrespectful. He sent a very polite email to the people working there. Theres absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. Its part of doing business and doing customer service. The response frankly was absolutely ridiculous. At the very least the response could have been more polite and simply said we apologize and are working on it.

ekidd 16y ago
Given Tumblr's explosive popularity, there's no way that they aren't a giant ball of stress right now. It's certainly nice to have $40 million, but that's of little use in the short term: As Fred Brooks famously pointed out, adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. So the people who understand Tumblr's systems are almost certainly working nights and weekends and going slowly insane. And there's no relief for them: If Tumblr hires more staff, their current engineers will still have to deal with all the crises and train the new people. It's the CEO's job to deal with disappointed and angry customers. But it's also the CEO's job to deal with programmers who are working 70 hour weeks and who are just about ready to snap and move to a commune. Startups can be full of bad craziness. In a perfect world, customers would talk to the CEO and the customer support team, and not try to directly contact the engineering team. That's not to say that Tumblr handled this especially well. But again, it's not an easy situation.

ekidd 16y ago

Given Tumblr's explosive popularity, there's no way that they aren't a giant ball of stress right now. It's certainly nice to have $40 million, but that's of little use in the short term: As Fred Brooks famously pointed out, adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. So the people who understand Tumblr's systems are almost certainly working nights and weekends and going slowly insane. And there's no relief for them: If Tumblr hires more staff, their current engineers will still have to deal with all the crises and train the new people. It's the CEO's job to deal with disappointed and angry customers. But it's also the CEO's job to deal with programmers who are working 70 hour weeks and who are just about ready to snap and move to a commune. Startups can be full of bad craziness. In a perfect world, customers would talk to the CEO and the customer support team, and not try to directly contact the engineering team. That's not to say that Tumblr handled this especially well. But again, it's not an easy situation.