I suspect, because I have been in a similar situation before, that the author is frustrated because the company first ignored/downplayed the significance of his concern, then blamed his issue on user error (without accepting responsibility), and then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it".

When companies behave this way it feels like you're being gaslit, which is extremely frustrating. The author may have gotten the result they initially wanted, but it would have felt like a huge, disrespectful, slap in the face.

Tech support gaslighting. Perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon. Someone make an urban dictionary entry.

Interestingly enough, I vaguely remember a pg article about how Lisp was so effective he could deploy fixes during a customer support call about the issue, to the point the customer thought they had messed up instead of the application. I can’t seem to find that now, but this one is close (in praising Lisp’s speed advantage for startups):

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

> I can’t seem to find that now

Here you are: http://www.paulgraham.com/lwba.html

Thanks! Weird that for that one you have to click through to the ascii-text version and it's not in the format of the other articles.

No, I didn't change anything. It just started working again.

An easy claim to make in the world of service auto-scaling and auto-replacement :)

> then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it"

As he points out in the article, they alerted him to the documentation updates in the course of their emails back and forth.

Fair point about being frustrated with the initial customer support experience, though. Definitely crappy.

> As he points out in the article, they alerted him to the documentation updates in the course of their emails back and forth.

Technically, this is true. From the story though, it sounds like the PM included this information after the author reached out to the PM directly. Only after that did support say "I see we reached out to you about documentation updated!".

So while yes, they did technically tell the author about the documentation update, I'm not sure I would classify it as them "alerting" the author.

> From the story though, it sounds like the PM included this information after the author reached out to the PM directly.

Exactly the case, and it's because he happened to have the PMs email. Not because Stripe gave it to him or offered to send the PM his way.

(I work at Stripe but don’t in any way speak for the company. This purely personal.)

I don’t mind them publishing this. It doesn’t feel unfair or dramatizing or in bad faith (etc.)

At the end of the day we build things to try and make other humans’ lives easier; to wrap the complexities of “global financial internet infrastructure” so business owners like the OP can focus on things that are not “collecting Canadian taxes”.

Whether Stripe ended up making the “right” changes in this case or not, we didn’t hit that bar.

And as “someone who works for Stripe but absolutely in no way speaks for Stripe”, it’s a productive reminder of the downstream effects of what we build. What we build has real world implications, ones people at Stripe take very seriously.

It hurts to read about the misses, but I would 10000% rather read about it on the front page of HN than us not know about it. And in this case, again, what they wrote doesn’t feel like it’s in bad faith, so it’s useful feedback.

> what they wrote doesn’t feel like it’s in bad faith

Not a stripe employee, but this is why I’m glad this was written and published, too.

Obviously the author is upset — I would be, too! — but even if I don’t totally agree with them, they presented their story in a very reasonable, non-inflammatory way, and suggested improvements.

That’s going above and beyond, as far “customer complaint” goes.

I work for a company about which people talk a lot publicly (and which I do not represent officially or speak for in any sense), and I tend to feel the same way.

Eighty times out of a hundred, it's solid signal of something.

Nineteen times out of a hundred, it's hilariously off base in a way that's good for a laugh.

It's only maybe that one percent that I wish someone had kept their rude/bad/ignorant/whatever opinion to themselves -- but the eighty percent are worth being 'put on blast' however many times, because that's how you stay focused on making things better. (And the nineteen remind you not to take it too seriously)

I'm glad this was posted here, for our education and because they didn't fix the issue until it was called out publicly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23764785

If they have a pattern of customer service problems then it's best that people know it.