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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

They hoped so.

One wonders how many others didn't get enough Twitter cred, before. That some low-level ticket stamper (even a high-level ticket-stamper) had authority to deep-six a customer on no more say-so than high CPU usage tells us more about the company than an incident report massaged by marketing communication specialists. Simply, the latter sounds good because it has been made to sound good by sounds-good experts, and could say anything; but the event itself is ground truth.

They will need a lot more time and good behavior to live this down.

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I agree on the twitter cred point. The fact that this happened in the end, personally I think it is a good thing as it highlighted a weakness we must fix.

We trust our people high-level, low-level whatever to make important decisions everyday. thats why they are here.

The "marketing communications specialists" are getting slammed a lot here, so I will just point out that they spend most of their time rolling their eyes at my crappy grammar, spelling and ludicrous number of comma splices. I don't think our goal was to sound like anything. We just wanted to lay out our investigation and the follow on work we are undertaking.

Totally agree with your point that trust is earned and we lost many peoples in the last few days. That will take time and as you say good behavior to earn back, but that is what we are committed to doing.

I talk about mktg comms because I have worked at places where angry customers got earnest letters promising changes, but the manager expected to implement the changes said "No, we're not doing that!" Or "OK" but nothing happened. So I don't give much credit for promises, even when it was the right thing to promise.

Giving your ticket punchers authority is good when they are authorized to do what customers need to get or keep going. Giving them authority to eliminate customers, not so much.

I have to agree with the commenters who say it was an exemplary postmortem.

Hospitals have been doing formal postmortems for many years, but the number of them didn't start down until they instituted checklists.

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