4 ms·

In fact, there's an inverse incentive at play here. Slack is on the hook for missed SLA, so any admission of issue is legally and financially culpable. This mea

by zamnos 3y ago

In fact, there's an inverse incentive at play here. Slack is on the hook for missed SLA, so any admission of issue is legally and financially culpable. This means they don't want to admit to an issue until it's impossible to deny there is one.

Hamuko 3y ago
There is also an incentive to display the proper status, since if you show all green when the service is down, you look dumb. We recently improved our status reporting because our old status system might not accurately indicate if only a part of our service went down, so it might show green even though (some) customers definitely saw very obvious downtime.
- capableweb 3y ago
  When the choice is between temporarily "looking dumb" and permanently loosing a bunch of money because of SLAs, companies like Salesforce usually make the latter choice.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    I feel like customers treating you like a bunch of fucking idiots is not gonna be a great boost to your bottom line either. Maybe if you're in a market sector where reputation doesn't matter and you don't have any competition swooping in.
    - thecopy 3y ago
      The people signing the contract with Slack is not looking at the status pages, generally.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        The people signing contracts ONLY look at the status page, and say everything’s fine. They don’t bother verifying it signing in.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Nah the issue isn't looking dumb, the issue is looking like a liar. What good is an SLA if your reputation is that you're going to lie to avoid paying out?
    - rwaksmunski 3y ago
      This is Salesforce we are talking about. They topped Stack Overflow as the most dreaded technology so they bribed SO not to include them anymore. They don't care if they look like liars to technical people. Technical people are not the decisions makers in their target customer base.
      - Volundr 3y ago
        > They topped Stack Overflow as the most dreaded technology so they bribed SO not to include them anymore. Wait what? And SO agreed? Where can I learn about this?
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
    Usually this is less being outright deceptive (saying you're up when you know you're down), and more wrapping the definition of "down" in legalese so that nothing short of a complete system outage of every aspect of your service for 100% of users counts as "down". In those cases status pages are more likely to have a lovely spectrum of yellows and oranges to choose from, but a distinct absence of red, but very few companies will say that they're fully green when they know there's issues. Green when you're down is usually more of a symptom of process problems in how outages get reported or resolved (no documentation, manual processes for updating, long communication chains from support teams to engineers).
- Timon3 3y ago
  > There is also an incentive to display the proper status, since if you show all green when the service is down, you look dumb. How many customers will think you look dumb? If you admit downtime, will the accurate reporting drive away more new customers, than the inaccurate reporting drives away due to you looking dumb? "Looking dumb" is not a reasonable factor. Damage to your public image is, but that's divorced from looking dumb. It's entirely possible Slack is saving money by not admitting their downtimes, because it leaves a better image.
wdr1 3y ago
And yet, this generally doesn't happen. Slack now has the outage listed: https://status.slack.com/calendar https://status.slack.com/calendar The online cynicism is something I've never understood. It assumes the world is filled first first-order simpletons & somehow only the poster rises above it. People aren't dumb & companies aren't dumb. People will notice a status tracker isn't accurate. They will have reduced confidence in the company. Companies know people will notice & think this way, so they generally don't engage in this type of deception. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general, status pages have tended to be accurate in my experience.
- zamnos 3y ago
  You can't measure "reduced confidence" like you can a dollars going out for not meeting an SLA, and what are you going to do in this case? Move to Microsoft Teams? Please.

by zamnos 3y ago

Hamuko 3y ago

There is also an incentive to display the proper status, since if you show all green when the service is down, you look dumb. We recently improved our status reporting because our old status system might not accurately indicate if only a part of our service went down, so it might show green even though (some) customers definitely saw very obvious downtime.

capableweb 3y ago
When the choice is between temporarily "looking dumb" and permanently loosing a bunch of money because of SLAs, companies like Salesforce usually make the latter choice.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  I feel like customers treating you like a bunch of fucking idiots is not gonna be a great boost to your bottom line either. Maybe if you're in a market sector where reputation doesn't matter and you don't have any competition swooping in.
  - thecopy 3y ago
    The people signing the contract with Slack is not looking at the status pages, generally.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The people signing contracts ONLY look at the status page, and say everything’s fine. They don’t bother verifying it signing in.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Nah the issue isn't looking dumb, the issue is looking like a liar. What good is an SLA if your reputation is that you're going to lie to avoid paying out?
  - rwaksmunski 3y ago
    This is Salesforce we are talking about. They topped Stack Overflow as the most dreaded technology so they bribed SO not to include them anymore. They don't care if they look like liars to technical people. Technical people are not the decisions makers in their target customer base.
    - Volundr 3y ago
      > They topped Stack Overflow as the most dreaded technology so they bribed SO not to include them anymore. Wait what? And SO agreed? Where can I learn about this?
- ryanbrunner 3y ago
  Usually this is less being outright deceptive (saying you're up when you know you're down), and more wrapping the definition of "down" in legalese so that nothing short of a complete system outage of every aspect of your service for 100% of users counts as "down". In those cases status pages are more likely to have a lovely spectrum of yellows and oranges to choose from, but a distinct absence of red, but very few companies will say that they're fully green when they know there's issues. Green when you're down is usually more of a symptom of process problems in how outages get reported or resolved (no documentation, manual processes for updating, long communication chains from support teams to engineers).
Timon3 3y ago
> There is also an incentive to display the proper status, since if you show all green when the service is down, you look dumb. How many customers will think you look dumb? If you admit downtime, will the accurate reporting drive away more new customers, than the inaccurate reporting drives away due to you looking dumb? "Looking dumb" is not a reasonable factor. Damage to your public image is, but that's divorced from looking dumb. It's entirely possible Slack is saving money by not admitting their downtimes, because it leaves a better image.

wdr1 3y ago

And yet, this generally doesn't happen. Slack now has the outage listed: https://status.slack.com/calendar https://status.slack.com/calendar The online cynicism is something I've never understood. It assumes the world is filled first first-order simpletons & somehow only the poster rises above it. People aren't dumb & companies aren't dumb. People will notice a status tracker isn't accurate. They will have reduced confidence in the company. Companies know people will notice & think this way, so they generally don't engage in this type of deception. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general, status pages have tended to be accurate in my experience.

zamnos 3y ago
You can't measure "reduced confidence" like you can a dollars going out for not meeting an SLA, and what are you going to do in this case? Move to Microsoft Teams? Please.