4 ms·

It's absolutely great how @patio11 managed to recreate exactly the same system within stripe despite being fully aware of it. (I save up my karma points precis

It's absolutely great how @patio11 managed to recreate exactly the same system within stripe despite being fully aware of it. (I save up my karma points precisely so I can burn them on comments like this.)

RationalDino 3y ago
I'm not sure which part you are referring to by "exactly the same system", or to what extent patio11 is personally responsible for it. However listen to his explanations of the incentives, benefits, and downsides. Then remember that he was working within a company that had the exact same incentives (eg same regulatory regimes), who was going to be hiring people out of the same financial system. And remember that there are parts of this that he think really make the world better. Therefore the expected result really should be, "Somewhat better iteration on the basic thing that everyone else does." And so it is no surprise that it would include enough of what you don't like that you'd see it as "exactly the same system".
e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
My impression of what he wrote is that it's an explanation of the status quo, not a denunciation of it. In his conclusion: > Although it certainly doesn’t feel like it to people who hit edge cases, the tiered support model is a technology which took us decades to popularize and which made the world much better. It brought down the cost of financial services and supported product innovation which would have been impossible under the mid-century bank staffing model. We could not have credit cards or discount brokerages without the tiered support model. The biography of Charles Schwab makes this point persuasively at considerable length: competent telephone operations were instrumental to bringing equity ownership to the middle class. You should prefer a world with credit cards and discount brokerages to one which doesn’t have them, even as you listen to hold music occasionally Tiered support is here to stay because tiered support is cheap and resistant to the "unintelligent customer DoS" (my words, not his). As he points out, you can have professional troubleshooters with the capability, authority, and expertise to troubleshoot the problem, but their labour costs in the hundreds of dollars an hour. I personally think there is a reasonable model of the world where customers explicitly pay a hundred dollar fee to have a highest-tier escalation to the office of the CEO/equivalent troubleshooting team and have them take a look at your case, but this is a model that has not yet been developed or in wide use anywhere.
- boilerupnc 3y ago
  I’ve been having a fun ride reading “QualityLand” [0] . In that world - those who have QualityPoints can exert far more escalation force on all parts of their life (change the traffic signal now for 10 units) than lower level folks. Your comment reminds me of a world where paying fees gets you faster and better access. Sadly - Sounds familiar. [0]https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4062/qualityland https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/406...
  - Sebguer 3y ago
    This sounds like effectively the same premise as Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
  - WhiteOwlLion 3y ago
    Fastrak anyone?
- krisoft 3y ago
  > there is a reasonable model of the world where customers explicitly pay a hundred dollar fee to have a highest-tier escalation to the office of the CEO/equivalent troubleshooting team It is tricky. On a first order I agree with you, but then i think about second order consequences: What if the escalation route becomes profitable? Will that incentivize the company to keep the pain points, or perhaps even engineer more of them? Also, would it be clear what does the money pays for? Imagine a situation where the computer says no (that is the system makes a decision adverse to the customer’s interest, such as closing an account, not approving a loan, security freezing assets etc), and the costumer pays the fee to get it escalated. The CEO office person reads the case, applies their troubleshooting skills, and they independent of the computer come up with the same answer. Now from the point of view of the costumer it feels they paid hundreds of dollar for nothing. From the point of view of the company they gave the customer what they promised: spent valuable resources on escalating the customer’s complaint. If they give the fee back to the customer they are loosing money, if they don’t they further antagonise a bad situation. Which can have reputational effects, and or wasting even more resources. And this might sound like an edge case, but if the system is well operating these kind of cases will be dominating. Simply because if the CEO’s office overrides the normal processes too often then either they are profiting from the escalation route (see first point) or the normal system is faulty. How would you dodge these two bullets?
orliesaurus 3y ago
what he do?
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Human organizations are, strangely enough, natural systems, which are notoriously hard to control without making them worse. It's one thing to know how a beaver dam works; it's another to muck about with the river hoping to come up with a better dam.
- throwawayyhbd 3y ago
  Seriously someone should create Kubernetes - but for company-building.
andrewflnr 3y ago
Are you confusing Patrick Collison, who cofounded Stripe, with Patrick McKenzie, who joined years later to work on documentation?
libraryatnight 3y ago
This was my thought. This write-up is for understanding a system not to fix it, but to abuse it and profit from it. It's sort of black hat in a way.

RationalDino 3y ago

I'm not sure which part you are referring to by "exactly the same system", or to what extent patio11 is personally responsible for it. However listen to his explanations of the incentives, benefits, and downsides. Then remember that he was working within a company that had the exact same incentives (eg same regulatory regimes), who was going to be hiring people out of the same financial system. And remember that there are parts of this that he think really make the world better. Therefore the expected result really should be, "Somewhat better iteration on the basic thing that everyone else does." And so it is no surprise that it would include enough of what you don't like that you'd see it as "exactly the same system".

e63f67dd-065b 3y ago

My impression of what he wrote is that it's an explanation of the status quo, not a denunciation of it. In his conclusion: > Although it certainly doesn’t feel like it to people who hit edge cases, the tiered support model is a technology which took us decades to popularize and which made the world much better. It brought down the cost of financial services and supported product innovation which would have been impossible under the mid-century bank staffing model. We could not have credit cards or discount brokerages without the tiered support model. The biography of Charles Schwab makes this point persuasively at considerable length: competent telephone operations were instrumental to bringing equity ownership to the middle class. You should prefer a world with credit cards and discount brokerages to one which doesn’t have them, even as you listen to hold music occasionally Tiered support is here to stay because tiered support is cheap and resistant to the "unintelligent customer DoS" (my words, not his). As he points out, you can have professional troubleshooters with the capability, authority, and expertise to troubleshoot the problem, but their labour costs in the hundreds of dollars an hour. I personally think there is a reasonable model of the world where customers explicitly pay a hundred dollar fee to have a highest-tier escalation to the office of the CEO/equivalent troubleshooting team and have them take a look at your case, but this is a model that has not yet been developed or in wide use anywhere.

boilerupnc 3y ago
I’ve been having a fun ride reading “QualityLand” [0] . In that world - those who have QualityPoints can exert far more escalation force on all parts of their life (change the traffic signal now for 10 units) than lower level folks. Your comment reminds me of a world where paying fees gets you faster and better access. Sadly - Sounds familiar. [0]https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4062/qualityland https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/406...
- Sebguer 3y ago
  This sounds like effectively the same premise as Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
- WhiteOwlLion 3y ago
  Fastrak anyone?
krisoft 3y ago
> there is a reasonable model of the world where customers explicitly pay a hundred dollar fee to have a highest-tier escalation to the office of the CEO/equivalent troubleshooting team It is tricky. On a first order I agree with you, but then i think about second order consequences: What if the escalation route becomes profitable? Will that incentivize the company to keep the pain points, or perhaps even engineer more of them? Also, would it be clear what does the money pays for? Imagine a situation where the computer says no (that is the system makes a decision adverse to the customer’s interest, such as closing an account, not approving a loan, security freezing assets etc), and the costumer pays the fee to get it escalated. The CEO office person reads the case, applies their troubleshooting skills, and they independent of the computer come up with the same answer. Now from the point of view of the costumer it feels they paid hundreds of dollar for nothing. From the point of view of the company they gave the customer what they promised: spent valuable resources on escalating the customer’s complaint. If they give the fee back to the customer they are loosing money, if they don’t they further antagonise a bad situation. Which can have reputational effects, and or wasting even more resources. And this might sound like an edge case, but if the system is well operating these kind of cases will be dominating. Simply because if the CEO’s office overrides the normal processes too often then either they are profiting from the escalation route (see first point) or the normal system is faulty. How would you dodge these two bullets?

orliesaurus 3y ago

what he do?

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Human organizations are, strangely enough, natural systems, which are notoriously hard to control without making them worse. It's one thing to know how a beaver dam works; it's another to muck about with the river hoping to come up with a better dam.

throwawayyhbd 3y ago
Seriously someone should create Kubernetes - but for company-building.

andrewflnr 3y ago

Are you confusing Patrick Collison, who cofounded Stripe, with Patrick McKenzie, who joined years later to work on documentation?

libraryatnight 3y ago

This was my thought. This write-up is for understanding a system not to fix it, but to abuse it and profit from it. It's sort of black hat in a way.