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I'm not a user of Fly.io. I can't help but notice how remarkable the effect of open communication on potential end users like me. I remember reading about their

I'm not a user of Fly.io. I can't help but notice how remarkable the effect of open communication on potential end users like me. I remember reading about their reliability problems on HN some time ago. That biased my view of the company. After reading this, the open communication and transparency restored my trust in them, and would make them again a potential candidate for future projects. Because now I know that they acknowledge the problem and that they are trying to improve things.

leetrout 4y ago
mrkurt[1] is also active here and has been very transparent in his comments about scaling issues. Similar to this post he commented a week ago: > In a year we'll either be ahead of those, or not growing anymore due to ongoing capacity issues. I'm hoping for the former. I am rooting for Fly! Great team. The company reminds me of early HashiCorp. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mrkurt https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mrkurt
mbesto 4y ago
Me too. However, this is a double edge sword. Their key value proposition is scale / speed which makes it concerning that they haven't "solved" that yet.
willio58 4y ago
Agreed, this is how company communication should be. I don't use Fly but would consider them in the future even given their recent issues. I look at this in contrast to Twitter who had/has? an outage today. Their leadership is opaque and doesn't take responsibility for the issues they are causing.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  In fairness, a CEO who has basically been Kanye-ing himself and his company into irrelevance is a low bar.
gizmo 4y ago
This post is carefully worded corporate messaging, but because they write for their developer audience it has an informal "oh shucks we messed up bad y'all" vibe to it. But make no mistake, this is 100% corporate messaging. I get that growing is super hard. And maybe fly will grow up to be a good platform some day. But that's the future. Today, they're flying by the seat of their pants and I mostly feel sorry for people who were tricked into thinking this platform is ready for production use.
- spoiler 4y ago
  I'm not sure why the cynicism around their candor. Do you think it's not genuine just because it was posted by a company employee? Your post implies corporate messaging is bad. And anything posted by a company—or at least I don't know where you draw the line—can be considered corporate messaging. Am I just reading too much into your phrasing?
  - gizmo 4y ago
    It's strategic messaging. It can't be genuine, because of what it is. The benefit they get is publicity and damage control, and as you can tell by the many responses here, it buys them time because many developers are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Companies that engage in this kind of candor are careful not to disclose those things that would really hurt their business. Those things are still kept secret. If the CEO accidentally sexually harassed an employee that's not getting disclosed. A mea culpa is only offered for the issues that are already known regarding scaling, downtime, and missing features. Struggles they have because they're choosing to grow so fast.
    - dadrian 4y ago
      Sorry, what? Do you expect that no company can think about what to write before they post it, or that any post about anything internal must cover all internal issues? Posts must be either all roses or a no-thought laundry list of everything bad?
      - 4y ago
newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
snapetom 4y ago
This is probably therapy, but your message and fly.io's post resonates a lot with what I'm going through. I took a product owner role about 6 months ago, my first, with a company that has turned out to be just a mired mess, and a product universally hated both internally and externally. Long story short, it's completely over-engineered by a bunch of intellectual engineers with no focus, no discipline, and no oversight. It ended up not delivering on any promises it made, and there were a lot of them. I was warned left and right before presentations and meetings, "this customer hates your product because of ...." I started off every meeting with saying, "we're rearchitecting the product, this is how we're doing it, this is the tech we are using." Immediately there was a sense of relief from customers, followed by questions like, "why can't <current product> deliver <feature> that was promised?" I'm completely honest with bad decisions that were made and how it impacted the feature. Sure, there is skepticism on what we are doing, and I tell them they should absolutely be skeptical based on our track record. The result has been customers who have hated my product now offering to work with us on development. I've also been completely forthcoming on configuration, security, resources, and setup issues I am finding, many of them are absolutely freakin' insane. I've flat out told customers it's frankly embarrassing and never let us do something like this in the future. The best feedback on this was, "At least you're telling us something. We usually get silence from this team." God, this is the most depressing job ever.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Architectural astronauts.
- mrkurt 4y ago
  I feel this. I hope you get over the hump and your job gets fun. We've had flashes, at least, but I do think what we're doing (and probably what you're doing) require some irrational behavior.
  - snapetom 4y ago
    I have a POC I'm trying to get out in a couple of weeks. It's for the #1 feature that was promised in this product, never possible due to the architecture, and we've gotten raked over the coals for it. Wish me luck, because if I can get it out soon, it's going to be downhill for a while.
alfalfasprout 4y ago
This is huge. Even as a member of a larger company, this stuff matters. If you have a vendor that doesn't bullshit you when things go wrong, you can actually trust. This is how you avoid companies having the "hmmm they seem to be having lots of issues recently, let's consider moving off them" conversation.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > This is how you avoid companies having the "hmmm they seem to be having lots of issues recently, let's consider moving off them" conversation. Yeah, this is how you get companies to have the "well, it SEEMED they were having lots of issues, now it's clear that they indeed did, moving off of them is priority #1".
bodecker 4y ago
Open communication is great when there are incidents, but even better is having no incidents. (of course there are nuances depending on specific context)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eyelidlessness 4y ago
I’m not [directly, at present] in the market for their product but the very frank and real introduction basically moved Fly from my “I think I’ve heard of that but I’ll need my memory jogged for any further recognition” category to my “potentially good stuff to reference when relevant” category. This kind of frank and human communication is vulnerable, but it’s good for establishing credibility… with me at least!
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Really? For me it's the contrary, posts like this from companies are a signal to say "Jump out of the ship while you still can". Kinda like when crypto exchanges tweet "Yo we're definitely not blocking withdrawals, we're perfectly healthy". You know what would make me consider a company? The fact that they don't have a bad reputation to begin with, and don't need to make posts like that to try to save their reputation.

leetrout 4y ago

mrkurt[1] is also active here and has been very transparent in his comments about scaling issues. Similar to this post he commented a week ago: > In a year we'll either be ahead of those, or not growing anymore due to ongoing capacity issues. I'm hoping for the former. I am rooting for Fly! Great team. The company reminds me of early HashiCorp. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mrkurt https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mrkurt

mbesto 4y ago

Me too. However, this is a double edge sword. Their key value proposition is scale / speed which makes it concerning that they haven't "solved" that yet.

willio58 4y ago

Agreed, this is how company communication should be. I don't use Fly but would consider them in the future even given their recent issues. I look at this in contrast to Twitter who had/has? an outage today. Their leadership is opaque and doesn't take responsibility for the issues they are causing.

alfalfasprout 4y ago
In fairness, a CEO who has basically been Kanye-ing himself and his company into irrelevance is a low bar.

gizmo 4y ago

This post is carefully worded corporate messaging, but because they write for their developer audience it has an informal "oh shucks we messed up bad y'all" vibe to it. But make no mistake, this is 100% corporate messaging. I get that growing is super hard. And maybe fly will grow up to be a good platform some day. But that's the future. Today, they're flying by the seat of their pants and I mostly feel sorry for people who were tricked into thinking this platform is ready for production use.

spoiler 4y ago
I'm not sure why the cynicism around their candor. Do you think it's not genuine just because it was posted by a company employee? Your post implies corporate messaging is bad. And anything posted by a company—or at least I don't know where you draw the line—can be considered corporate messaging. Am I just reading too much into your phrasing?
- gizmo 4y ago
  It's strategic messaging. It can't be genuine, because of what it is. The benefit they get is publicity and damage control, and as you can tell by the many responses here, it buys them time because many developers are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Companies that engage in this kind of candor are careful not to disclose those things that would really hurt their business. Those things are still kept secret. If the CEO accidentally sexually harassed an employee that's not getting disclosed. A mea culpa is only offered for the issues that are already known regarding scaling, downtime, and missing features. Struggles they have because they're choosing to grow so fast.
  - dadrian 4y ago
    Sorry, what? Do you expect that no company can think about what to write before they post it, or that any post about anything internal must cover all internal issues? Posts must be either all roses or a no-thought laundry list of everything bad?
    - 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

[dead]

snapetom 4y ago

This is probably therapy, but your message and fly.io's post resonates a lot with what I'm going through. I took a product owner role about 6 months ago, my first, with a company that has turned out to be just a mired mess, and a product universally hated both internally and externally. Long story short, it's completely over-engineered by a bunch of intellectual engineers with no focus, no discipline, and no oversight. It ended up not delivering on any promises it made, and there were a lot of them. I was warned left and right before presentations and meetings, "this customer hates your product because of ...." I started off every meeting with saying, "we're rearchitecting the product, this is how we're doing it, this is the tech we are using." Immediately there was a sense of relief from customers, followed by questions like, "why can't <current product> deliver <feature> that was promised?" I'm completely honest with bad decisions that were made and how it impacted the feature. Sure, there is skepticism on what we are doing, and I tell them they should absolutely be skeptical based on our track record. The result has been customers who have hated my product now offering to work with us on development. I've also been completely forthcoming on configuration, security, resources, and setup issues I am finding, many of them are absolutely freakin' insane. I've flat out told customers it's frankly embarrassing and never let us do something like this in the future. The best feedback on this was, "At least you're telling us something. We usually get silence from this team." God, this is the most depressing job ever.

hinkley 4y ago
Architectural astronauts.
mrkurt 4y ago
I feel this. I hope you get over the hump and your job gets fun. We've had flashes, at least, but I do think what we're doing (and probably what you're doing) require some irrational behavior.
- snapetom 4y ago
  I have a POC I'm trying to get out in a couple of weeks. It's for the #1 feature that was promised in this product, never possible due to the architecture, and we've gotten raked over the coals for it. Wish me luck, because if I can get it out soon, it's going to be downhill for a while.

alfalfasprout 4y ago

This is huge. Even as a member of a larger company, this stuff matters. If you have a vendor that doesn't bullshit you when things go wrong, you can actually trust. This is how you avoid companies having the "hmmm they seem to be having lots of issues recently, let's consider moving off them" conversation.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
> This is how you avoid companies having the "hmmm they seem to be having lots of issues recently, let's consider moving off them" conversation. Yeah, this is how you get companies to have the "well, it SEEMED they were having lots of issues, now it's clear that they indeed did, moving off of them is priority #1".

bodecker 4y ago

Open communication is great when there are incidents, but even better is having no incidents. (of course there are nuances depending on specific context)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

eyelidlessness 4y ago

I’m not [directly, at present] in the market for their product but the very frank and real introduction basically moved Fly from my “I think I’ve heard of that but I’ll need my memory jogged for any further recognition” category to my “potentially good stuff to reference when relevant” category. This kind of frank and human communication is vulnerable, but it’s good for establishing credibility… with me at least!

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Really? For me it's the contrary, posts like this from companies are a signal to say "Jump out of the ship while you still can". Kinda like when crypto exchanges tweet "Yo we're definitely not blocking withdrawals, we're perfectly healthy". You know what would make me consider a company? The fact that they don't have a bad reputation to begin with, and don't need to make posts like that to try to save their reputation.