Completely agree. Can we please keep the pitchforks on Reddit. It's so incredibly easily to point the finger when you really have no idea. I'm all for calling out their lack of communication, but picking someone you deem to be responsible and calling for their head is pretty medieval.

Why do you think "pitchforks" are on or should be on Reddit? That's a very odd thing to say on Hacker News. And if you don't like Reddit, just don't go there!

At no point did I say anything _should_ be on Reddit - I have no influence or say over what goes on on Reddit, but if you take a look through many recent posts, you will find massive amounts of mob mentality. Thankfully this kind of behaviour is much less common on hn and the community is generally much more open to discussion. I would love for this to continue to be so.

They are literally the head of "customer success". The buck should probably not stop ONLY with them, but obviously they're one of the people it needs to stop with

You seem to be implying that customer success is a customer support role. It isn't. Customer success is about helping customers get the greatest business value from your product. They are not going to be munging databases and wrangling backups. Support engineers (among others) do that work.

Customers unable to access the product they paid for, for over a week with very little communication, are not experiencing success.

These are the kind of incidents where parties and celebrations are put on hold and everyone does what they can to help, regardless of department or title.

Assuming that the "Global Head of Customer Success" is a leadership role that covers support engineering teams (no clue, but it appears to be some sort of executive position), then it's sorta beside the point whether or not the person is personally munging databases and wrangling backups. If an organization fails it is the fault of its leadership. The buck has to stop somewhere. Whether the "root cause" was risky engineering practices, careless employees, or just back luck, the blame lies with leadership, who should have established safer practices, not hired careless employees, and had a plan to mitigate the unlucky circumstance.

Well right now customers are getting zero value. It’s a bad look to be partying during an all hands on deck emergency.

More hands on that deck probably don't help.

And yet maybe they could have personally responded to the impacted customers with informative, timely updates instead of waiting several days and then sending automated replies from templates.

You’re talking about the outage.

They’re talking about the outage lasting for two weeks without any communication as to what’s going on.

Being a leader at the top of the food chain in a company this big means that you get to take credit for a significant portion of the success of company and your paycheck has an extra zero or two more than most people working for you. It's only fair that they have to take the blame for the horrible mistakes that their teams make.