This all reads to me like dysfunction and incompetence rather than true malice.
> Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?
Yes just like the Sev B of Amazon where a customer could email [email protected] and rain pain onto people at Amazon. someone else in the large discussion said that from their own company's analysis for developer advocacy impact this kind of HN front page coverage is equivalent to an 8 figure marketing spend so I imagine this got escalated pretty damn fast.
You're right though that it is janky that the only way to be heard is to go public, but equally the negative PR has probably cost them much much more than the comparative peanuts they were hoping to make from this one account.
Wether that’s giving a serious punishment to one oversealous employee, or a light reprimand to everyone in a department, there has to be some action taken to regain credibility. (along with proof that such action was taken)
So Slack is large enough to not be able to identify "countless billing disputes", which is not what @casq identified as being the situation (note the direction of communication initiation):
Yet agile enough to have both their CEO and CPO become aware of and respond in this discussion thread within hours of the thread's creation?> Slack are hardly going to hang out to dry an overzealous junior hire but so often that is the root cause in these situations and so the fix is processes and training...
And what would be "the fix" had this interaction remained known only to a customer and Slack?
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285280