My Stripe Tax Story

Re:My Stripe Tax Story by nrmitchi on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @10:20PM (#30536740)

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.

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by dhc02 on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @10:47PM (#30536927)

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

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by SilasX on Thursday March 03, 2022 @01:06AM (#30537734)

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

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by codeofdusk on Thursday March 03, 2022 @04:13AM (#30538870)

> I can’t seem to find that now

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

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by SilasX on Thursday March 03, 2022 @01:04PM (#30544398)

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.

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by batch12 on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @11:04PM (#30537037)

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

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by judge2020 on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @11:45PM (#30537254)

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

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by dabernathy89 on Thursday March 03, 2022 @12:06AM (#30537370)

> 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.

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by nrmitchi on Thursday March 03, 2022 @11:47AM (#30543383)

> 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.

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Re:My Stripe Tax Story by flutas on Thursday March 03, 2022 @12:31PM (#30543930)

> 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.

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