News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on More details about the October 4 outage. Parent comment

Re:More details about the October 4 outage by bob1029 on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @03:58PM (#28764789)
Relentless customer service is never going to screw you over in my experience... It pains me that we have to constantly play these games of abstraction between engineer and customer. You are presumably working a job which involves some business and some customer. It is not a fucking daycare. If any of my customers are pissed about their experience, I want to be on the phone with them as soon as humanly possible and I want to hear it myself. Yes, it is a dreadful experience to get bitched at, but it also sharpens your focus like you wouldn't believe when you can't just throw a problem to the guy behind you.

By all means, put the support/enhancement requests through a separate channel+buffer so everyone can actually get work done during the day. But, at no point should an engineer ever be allowed to feel like they don't have to answer to some customer. If you are terrified a junior dev is going to say a naughty phrase to a VIP, then invent an internal customer for them to answer to, and diligently proxy the end customer's sentiment for the engineer's benefit.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:More details about the October 4 outage by ethbr0 on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @05:14PM (#28765709)
I think of this is terms of empathy: every engineer should be able to provide a quick and accurate answer to "What do our customers want? And how do they use our product?"

I'm not talking esoterica, but at least a first approximation.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:More details about the October 4 outage by yaknh on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @10:37PM (#28768535)
Why? Like we all are customers as well as an employee.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:More details about the October 4 outage by ativzzz on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @12:42AM (#28769279)
Because we as engineers create software for our customers, and if you don't understand who your customers are how can you create software that actually suits their needs?

Very rarely are we our own customers

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:More details about the October 4 outage by fragmede on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @05:35AM (#28770986)
I would argue that SREs are consistently our own customers in a way unique to SRE.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:More details about the October 4 outage by ethbr0 on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @10:29AM (#28773602)
Ironic, as measurability came up in another comment thread I'm in.

I'd say from a technical perspective SREs are, but there's a potential (depends on product) gap between their technical goals and user goals.

e.g. What does "p95 latency is spiking" actually mean to the end user?

[ Parent | on HN ]