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> All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left There are still plenty of talented engineers at Heroku. I used to do architecture work and support for ent

by jbm 4y ago

> All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left There are still plenty of talented engineers at Heroku. I used to do architecture work and support for enterprise customers and I knew the whole support team. Heroku support engineers are all devs or former devs; I am surprised at how passionate they can be about their work (ex: Jason, who STILL keeps the subreddit updated in his spare time). I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. They can't help you setup crypto miners on the platform, or to setup a redirect service. If you don't like how the platform works, they can drop in suggestions on what to change, but they aren't going to be able to implement them overnight. You might get ideas on restructuring your app to work better on Heroku, which I admit is quite frustrating for a customer; but limiting the problem domain is part of building a service like Heroku. Heroku's support structure didn't have a half dozen escalations, which was good IMO. If you run into an issue on the platform, there is usually the support engineer and then engineers who developed it. This might have changed around when I left (my team was mostly eliminated during the pandemic), so I'm not particularly up-to-date on recent changes. However, the system they had in place when I was there felt much better, as a developer who needs help, than the support I currently get from (large IAAS provider), despite myself doing work for a major customer of theirs.

hthrowaway5 4y ago
You support folks were absolutely stellar. Great at working with customers but also adept at coding enough to resolve an incredible amount of customer problems. If anyone is ever in a position to hire support staff and you see "Heroku" on the resume, definitely consider that a strong positive signal.
bastawhiz 4y ago
> I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. This hasn't been my experience at all. Mysterious performance issues are met with "We can't help, just install NewRelic" (the issues don't exist when running the same code on other services). Billing questions have yielded delayed and cryptic responses. Table stakes customer support simply isn't being addressed. And I don't blame the support agents, I just don't think they have the tools or resources to help. By comparison, AWS has managed to answer almost all of my questions within one or two messages. Hell, even Amazon has admitted when there's a bug on their end. That simply doesn't happen at heroku anymore.
- jbm 4y ago
  I hate that I missed this response because it's a fair criticism. Yeah, there are definitely details Heroku didn't have; for example, we only had something like the past 500 (or was it 100?) lines from a customer's logs; you would need to have an add-on to retain them. There were no internal logs to consult about app performance; the New Relic install requests were probably to see if there is an issue related to the app. If the issue went deeper, we would work with the engineering team for the feature in question; but with the volume of tickets, we would have to categorically rule out an app issue first as 99% of issues happened while I was there. I think it is fair to say Heroku's support tried to embrace the "teach a man to fish" strategy, and that wouldn't work if the problem wasn't with the app. I can't really speak to the billing issues, but that team was tiny; two or three people. I could definitely see them getting overwhelmed, and I heard about the lack of detailed billing support. (Out of curiousity, were you using Heroku's docker product? I could definitely see that as having caused the sort of problems you mention as Heroku's docker platform was not vanilla docker.)

by jbm 4y ago

hthrowaway5 4y ago

You support folks were absolutely stellar. Great at working with customers but also adept at coding enough to resolve an incredible amount of customer problems. If anyone is ever in a position to hire support staff and you see "Heroku" on the resume, definitely consider that a strong positive signal.

bastawhiz 4y ago

> I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. This hasn't been my experience at all. Mysterious performance issues are met with "We can't help, just install NewRelic" (the issues don't exist when running the same code on other services). Billing questions have yielded delayed and cryptic responses. Table stakes customer support simply isn't being addressed. And I don't blame the support agents, I just don't think they have the tools or resources to help. By comparison, AWS has managed to answer almost all of my questions within one or two messages. Hell, even Amazon has admitted when there's a bug on their end. That simply doesn't happen at heroku anymore.

jbm 4y ago
I hate that I missed this response because it's a fair criticism. Yeah, there are definitely details Heroku didn't have; for example, we only had something like the past 500 (or was it 100?) lines from a customer's logs; you would need to have an add-on to retain them. There were no internal logs to consult about app performance; the New Relic install requests were probably to see if there is an issue related to the app. If the issue went deeper, we would work with the engineering team for the feature in question; but with the volume of tickets, we would have to categorically rule out an app issue first as 99% of issues happened while I was there. I think it is fair to say Heroku's support tried to embrace the "teach a man to fish" strategy, and that wouldn't work if the problem wasn't with the app. I can't really speak to the billing issues, but that team was tiny; two or three people. I could definitely see them getting overwhelmed, and I heard about the lack of detailed billing support. (Out of curiousity, were you using Heroku's docker product? I could definitely see that as having caused the sort of problems you mention as Heroku's docker platform was not vanilla docker.)