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This (designing processes for rare edge cases) is endemic not only in people processes, but in technology-enabled business processes. I've had numerous clients
by gundmc 5y ago
This (designing processes for rare edge cases) is endemic not only in people processes, but in technology-enabled business processes. I've had numerous clients fall into the trap of trying to over-engineer their process flow with validations for every conceivable parameter and variation.
This sort of implementation inevitably becomes a mountain of technical debt that overfits to the current process and reduces operational agility when the current process changes. At some point with business applications you have to trust your people to do the work and view the technology as something that enables that rather than necessarily constrains every dimension of it.
- ryandrake 5y agoThis reminds me of “The Computer Won’t Let Me” problem with many companies’ customer support lines. You call about some edge case problem, like your modem’s MAC addressed was entered wrong by the installer tech (not a real example but whatever). The support agent would like to help you, but your problem is sufficiently off the normal rails that the agent can’t manually correct it. The field is not editable on his screen, and that’s that. The process won’t allow them to fix it. This happens a lot with billing errors. An exceptional outage happens and the agent wants to help but they can’t because the Holy Computer was programmed to not trust customer support to adjust people’s bills. I’m sorry, Dave, but I’m afraid I cannot do that.
- technofiend 5y agoTrue story. Happened over the last couple of weeks. Me: Kraken, I'd like to recover my old account I created years ago. Kraken support: Sure, just login from the same computer and IP. Me: I can't, I no longer have either of those things. Kraken: How did our customer service go? Me: It didn't. Kraken: We can fix it, just login to zoom from the same computer and IP... Ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
- bee_rider 5y agoOn the bright side, you no longer have an account with a wildly incompetent company. Same IP? Unless you are on a campus with statically allocated addresses or something...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ithkuil 5y agoI hope you're making this up. My spidery sense tells me that a random company cannot verify the IP I access zoom from. (Unless kraken was zoom itself presumably)
- dmurray 5y agoKraken is a cryptocurrency exchange so it's plausible that someone's years-inactive account actually is worth a small fortune (to the customer, and to any hacker).
- Hjfrf 5y agoMore importantly it's worth a small fortune to kraken if not claimed by the customer. Their financial incentives aren't aligned with customers.
- tetsusaiga 5y agoAhh, escheat, a word I just learned on here yesterday. haha
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ithkuil 5y agoOk but how can they check that you "login to zoom from the same IP"?
- technofiend 5y agoAnd that's my concern. I can't remember if there's a fractional bitcoin sitting around in a kraken wallet. Even if it's 1/10th of a bitcoin, that's enough to spend a little time trying to get it back.
- technofiend 5y agoHah. Why would I bother spinning some fantasy about Kraken's terrible support? Sadly, it's all true.
- teeray 5y agoSome of this is a guardrail against social engineering. They can have an armada of minimally-trained level 1 support telling people they need to plug in their modem for it to work. Anything unusual they encounter can be appropriately reviewed by people who will understand the issue and not suffer from the confused deputy problem.
- steveBK123 5y agoSounds about right. I blundered my home address when initially setting up my cable internet installation. The installer called from the other house and I redirected him. He told me just to call customer service to have it corrected. Multiple attempts, there is no way to change the billing/service address of an open account. Web says to call, customer service agent says to use web.. I've set to paperless billing and figure for any service visit, the tech will call me confused from 2 doors down and I will redirect them. Easy enough. Two year going now, so far so good.
- tzs 5y agoHave you tried telling them you are moving from the incorrect address to the correct address? I can see someone overlooking the need to support address corrections because that is probably a rare case, but customers moving within the company's service area and wanting to have service at the new address surely is common enough that they cannot have overlooked supporting that.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago> I can see someone overlooking the need to support address corrections because that is probably a rare case In my experience working working in tech support at a company that encouraged us to fix whatever we could do like as, service address and billing address changes occured everyday,multiple times a day. At the time I was there that ISP had fewer than 200,000 customer, wasn't even one of the big players at the time. Intenode in Australia, based in Adelaide, circa 2004 through 2010.
- cycomanic 5y agoHi, I was an internode customer from 2009-2016. Great company, great service, even though being competent with tech I never really used support (I think like 2 times during the time). Still the times I did use it there was always a very positive attitude from support.
- 5y ago
- Mezzie 5y agoThat's deliberate. It's cheaper. If they don't let their customer service agents have any autonomy, then they don't have to hire for things like 'judgement' and can just throw warm bodies in a chair, which makes people easy to replace and cheap to employ. It also prevents your cheapness from causing issues; if you hire decent people and rely on them, then it causes issues if those people leave en masse or start siding with your customers over you. "Sure, Mrs. Johnson, I'll forgive last month's bill; they don't pay enough managers to check and I'm quitting tomorrow what do I care?"
- yojo 5y agoI’ve seen it a lot in well-intentioned post-mortems. Some bad code gets pushed to production and causes an outage. The responsible team does a thorough review, and in a bout of self-flagellation proposes a long list of extra processes that add steps and checks essentially amounting to “don’t trust anyone to commit anything right ever.” If a level-headed manager doesn’t step in, this pile of process gets implemented, output drops, and people hate their jobs. I’ve seen a similar thing with integration tests, as on a team with decent unit test practices production bugs are often a result of bad assumptions about another team’s API. Eventually a mountain of brittle end-to-end tests cripples a team until they get managerial buy-in to rip them all out and the cycle starts over.
- Aeolun 5y agoWe are there now. It’s nice if people keep asking ‘how can we prevent this’, but at some point you have to say ‘we cannot’.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThis is the dark side / failure mode of checklist-based processes. Yes, checklists and process standardisation will avoid numerous types of errors and issues. However one of your checklist processes must be to assess the checklist itself, weeding and refactoring the checklist itself from time to time. This includes recognising that the refactored checklist will itself have further issues and shakedown bugs. Ultimately process is a compromise between what can be kept in working or near-at-hand memory, and what's both sufficient and required for the particular problem domain.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yojo 5y agoThat’s great, I’ve never thought of implementing “process refactoring” as a standard recurring process, but I will now.
- SilasX 5y agoThat … seems like a company that isn’t doing postmortems correctly. You’re not supposed to robotically implement every “what would have prevented this”. It’s just there to explore the space of such things and provide your options. “This is so rare and low impact that we change nothing” is a valid option! The purpose of keeping a record of past postmortems is that you can potentially go back and say “oh gosh, it isn’t actually rare, and so maybe the more elaborate countermeasures are justified”. I’ve seen the opposite extreme happen, where a devops guy was adamantly against writing a postmortem at all, because “it wasn’t our fault” and “it probably won’t happen again”. Facepalm.
- mianos 5y agoI see this come up more and more in calendar widgets. They don't allow any manual entry so if you are older than 30 and the year of birth picker is some ultra custom SPOS it takes old people like me literally 30 seconds to enter my birth year.
- ramses0 5y agoIn the early days of the internet you could tell CA startups from NY startups based on whether they allowed searching by state or zip-code + radius. (Spoiler: NY was "Search by State", CA/TX was "Zip + radius")
- bckr 5y agoCan you elaborate on this? Why would one state's startups prefer either of these search methods?
- Aloha 5y agoConsider the distances involved in NYC vs Texas or California.
- bobthepanda 5y agoI mean, search by state would also pull up results in Buffalo, which would be hilariously far.
- chockablock 5y agoAlso, in NYC, your nearest option might be in another state (NJ or CT). I don’t get this.
- bobthepanda 5y agoTo be fair, there are some types of products that can't be sold across state lines easily or at all (like insurance)
- ajmurmann 5y agoI think this might nicely dovetail with Taleb's anti-fragility. You get anti-fragility not by planning for every edge case (you'll miss some) but by building self-correction mechanisms and controls in that allow to adjust without waiting for the whole behemoth to move. Give people enough room to maneuver to handle exceptions. If you cannot trust people to do that you might to find different people
- EdwardDiego 5y agoEdge cases is where every legislatively mandated process I've ever administered has failed hard. The laws and regulations I was administering worked well for 99% of clients. But if you were in that 1%, shit sucked, sorry. Two examples: 1) You're a single parent working part-time as a legal secretary, and in receipt of some form of social welfare payment to ensure you and your children don't end up in hardship. You are offered full-time hours! Yes! Except because you hit the boundaries/limits/edge cases in the legislation, your net income will only increase by $30 a week, because your income tested supplementary assistances will decrease as your earnings do. Now, the legislation in play here, ensures social welfare and works okay for 99% of people (when I say "works okay", I mean, gives them money, and doesn't disincentivise work). But that income testing bites you as you approach the edge of the income curve. 2) You want to go hunting in a national park managed by the Dept of Conservation. The usual hunting permit requires that you only use centrefire rifles - rimfires and shotguns are totally banned (to prevent hunting of native birds, especially the tasty fruit fed kererū/kūkupa/wood pigeon[0]). However, you want to hunt red deer and chamois, with a crossbow. The policies at the time don't account for crossbows (and this was before bow hunting was as common place as it is now). So the department defaults to "No". In both situations, the broad rules work well for 99% of users. But for the 1% it sucks. The key to the 1% is human discretion and agency. Good systems, whether legal, business process, or algorithmic, always allow for a human to override. Bad ones don't. "Computer says no" style. (On the crossbows, a ranger (my Mum, I'll be honest) went into bat for the hunter in question, to determine what was needed for "no" to become "yes", and well, now there's a policy that determines the minimum draw weight for a crossbow to be considered humane - and no barbed or exploding bolts allowed! [1]) [0]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/birds-a-z/nz-pigeon-kereru https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/birds-a-... [1]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/things-to-do/hunting/permits-and-licences/bow-and-cross-bow-hunting/ https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/things-to-do/hu...
- jeramey 5y agoCheers to your mum for that! One of the trickiest parts of changing the rules in any bureaucracy or medium-to-large organization is if the org are lucky enough to still have people willing to stick their necks out to try to make things better for someone else. I admire the courage it takes to do something like she did.
- quickthrower2 5y agoReminds me of a company where a committee (with just one technical member) decides what JIRA tickets are allowed to be worked on. To minimise $arr_past_fuckups.map(will_happen)