4 ms·

Reminds me of when I worked at Yahoo, for not very long in the early 2000s. Yahoo had a consumer product called My Yahoo, a customisable home page with various

by cannam 6y ago

Reminds me of when I worked at Yahoo, for not very long in the early 2000s. Yahoo had a consumer product called My Yahoo, a customisable home page with various feeds in it, and at the time they also had a My Yahoo Enterprise Edition, which they tried to sell to companies to serve as an intranet home page. I worked (in a junior sort of way) on the European deployments of MYEE. Anyway, one of our customers - representing a company in Germany I think - filed a bug report that said something like "Weather module hasn't updated since January". They'd been going to their fancy intranet home page and seeing the same weather for months at a time. And this bug report just sat there. For a mixture of technical and political reasons, there seemed to be nobody in the European office able to pick up this report and do anything meaningful with it. We knew about it, we knew that what we were serving to paying customers was hopeless, but we somehow couldn't get our hooks into the right point in the Weather feed to figure out where it was going wrong. Or, collectively, we didn't care enough.

saagarjha 6y ago
You could replace Yahoo with any other company and this would be equally true.
smabie 6y ago
If this had happened at some of the other places I have worked, the CEO would have made all the developers stay in the office until the problem was fixed. Why did no one care?
- antipaul 6y ago
  Don't have to name them, but what kind of places are these that care? Big, small, tech, non-tech? Locations?
  - smabie 6y ago
    Well, for me, it was finance where you know each and everyone of your clients by name because each of them is paying millions of dollars a year for your product. The company had around 50 employees and a 200m valuation.
- msh 6y ago
  That sounds like pretty bad places to work. And very bad internal processes.
- cannam 6y ago
  To say no one cared is going too far, but it is interesting to think about why something like this was able to happen. There were various technical and structural factors making it difficult to fix. Weather feeds were known to be problematic (still are I guess) and this code would have been surprisingly low-level C/C++ with custom serialisations and limited logging. Structurally there were problems in getting attention from a team in California to support a problem experienced by a different team in London, especially since it affected relatively few users - a tension in supporting paid products in a company that is focused on non-paying users at far greater scale. (I am assuming this bug would have needed some actual development work - I don't recall, but I think we were familiar enough with common ops problems that it wasn't just a question of kicking one of our own feed servers.) But I do think there was an issue about lack of concern - at heart we didn't have enough confidence in our own product to motivate the personal pain of working through these problems and getting them solved. I think that, if you had gathered us together and asked our collective opinion, we would have suggested that this customer would be better off not using our product at all - it simply wasn't ever likely to be good enough. Once you reach that way of thinking about your own product, it becomes extremely hard to countenance fixing the most difficult problems with it.

by cannam 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago

You could replace Yahoo with any other company and this would be equally true.

smabie 6y ago

If this had happened at some of the other places I have worked, the CEO would have made all the developers stay in the office until the problem was fixed. Why did no one care?

antipaul 6y ago
Don't have to name them, but what kind of places are these that care? Big, small, tech, non-tech? Locations?
- smabie 6y ago
  Well, for me, it was finance where you know each and everyone of your clients by name because each of them is paying millions of dollars a year for your product. The company had around 50 employees and a 200m valuation.
msh 6y ago
That sounds like pretty bad places to work. And very bad internal processes.
cannam 6y ago
To say no one cared is going too far, but it is interesting to think about why something like this was able to happen. There were various technical and structural factors making it difficult to fix. Weather feeds were known to be problematic (still are I guess) and this code would have been surprisingly low-level C/C++ with custom serialisations and limited logging. Structurally there were problems in getting attention from a team in California to support a problem experienced by a different team in London, especially since it affected relatively few users - a tension in supporting paid products in a company that is focused on non-paying users at far greater scale. (I am assuming this bug would have needed some actual development work - I don't recall, but I think we were familiar enough with common ops problems that it wasn't just a question of kicking one of our own feed servers.) But I do think there was an issue about lack of concern - at heart we didn't have enough confidence in our own product to motivate the personal pain of working through these problems and getting them solved. I think that, if you had gathered us together and asked our collective opinion, we would have suggested that this customer would be better off not using our product at all - it simply wasn't ever likely to be good enough. Once you reach that way of thinking about your own product, it becomes extremely hard to countenance fixing the most difficult problems with it.