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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

> We take uptime very seriously, and we’re working hard to support the millions of customers that choose Coinbase to manage their cryptocurrency

No you don't.

- If you did, you'd hire a DBA team and they would be familiar with the various jobs in your environment. But first your founders would have to have respect for Operations, which will take a dozen more major outages.

The other major Coinbase outages have also been database-related, namely missing indexes.

- If you did, you wouldn't be doing major database (or other production) changes at 3 pm in the afternoon.

So let's cut to the chase. You prioritize features over Operations, and as a result guinea-pig your users. Just like any other SF startup. So just admit that to your end-users.

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>you wouldn't be doing major database (or other production) changes at 3 pm in the afternoon.

Coinbase isn't dedicated to one timezone. They fully support tons of countries and have customers all over the place.

Things like this have to happen at some point, and there are benefits to doing stuff like this during "work" hours (like having all of your staff online and available)

> Things like this have to happen at some point, and there are benefits to doing stuff like this during "work" hours (like having all of your staff online and available)

That sounds like a benefit to Coinbase and not to any of their customers.

If it shortens MTTR it's worth it. It has to be 3 PM for someone.

Their users are far from evenly distributed across timezones.

Eh, if Coinbase were the stock market and only open for trading for < 8 hours a day, I'd ding them, but it's always 3pm somewhere. 3pm PDT is 6pm EDT is 10pm UTC.

One can only hope that they know when their peak trading patterns generally are.

The inverse (not being able to do this during work hours) means that if you find an issue you won't be able to roll out a fix in an expedited manner.

Being able to fix things while they are running is a big advantage, and tends to make the entire stack lean more towards something resilient to partial failure

> Coinbase isn't dedicated to one timezone. They fully support tons of countries and have customers all over the place.

What timezone are their developers in? That’s the important question in this situation.

Devs deploying changes that affect customers at the end of the devs’ workday are reckless.

I think this is exactly correct, and I hate that this behavior of offloading testing onto users seems more and more to just be the expectation rather than the exception.

Coinbase had a number of issues when cryptocurrencies really exploded in 2017, and at that time I felt more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because the landscape of cryptocurrencies had shifted so dramatically and I could empathize with their struggles to keep up. Two years later, there aren't any excuses anymore in my mind. As the parent comment says -- it's just not a priority.

I've happily moved off the platform to other options which have given me no trouble whatsoever.

> You prioritize features over Operations, and as a result guinea-pig your users. Just like any other SF startup. So just admit that to your end-users.

Wow, I'm not from any "SF startup" but I find that side jab quite cunning.

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