If Denmark were a US state, it wouldn't even be in the top 20 in terms of population. If you assume that Denmark has lower usage of Tinder than US, CA, or UK, and then you assume that not all Danish people are paying with Danish credit cards (many of them would be using Play Store subscriptions, which seems like it would bypass the issue you're describing), the affected population is probably really small.
Then you also have to consider that most of Tinder's paying users are heterosexual men, and they know that they can screw those men over without losing their business because Tinder is an irreplaceable marketplace to find women.
With all those assumptions, Tinder isn't being as stupid as they sound, but rather coldly rational.
That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed.
The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the same dev could work on?
And the answer is possibly "never", depending on what high-impact bugs, features, or technical debt they have on their priority list.
It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.
That's a lot of work for something that will probably mean very little extra revenue.
Edit: just for clarity, I’d love to fix this bug myself. I also have a million other easy fixes that I’d like to do and I have a manager to help me prioritize them.
Other tasks might also be more critical to revenue generation.
At the end of the day, there are always going to be some issues left by the wayside so I think you really have to pick your battles.
I can't imagine how producing a PR for this with test cases, getting it reviewed, then shepherding through a typical QA/Staging/Prod pipeline would take less then a day for any code base of reasonable complexity.
Perhaps it wouldn't literally take 8 hours, but the focus shift of working on this would likely keep a dev from making much progress on other issues that day.
Because software is never that cut and dried. There's what supporters think is important, what PMs think is important, what front-line engineers think is important and what leadership thinks is important.
These priorities are frequently different and their actual impact is quite often disjoint from their position in the organization.
If and when this issue has a higher ROI than anything else, it should be worked on. The flow of new issues with higher ROI may prevent that from ever happening.
I think every developer can easily name 5+ minor bugs in a product they're working on that they know exist and know roughly how to fix, but may never get around to fixing. Or maybe I'm the weird or unlucky one, but that's been true of every production software I've ever worked on.
What can be argued strongly, I think, is that ROI calculation should take into account secondary effects such as the app's reputation in the country or the appearance of discriminating against a country.
I wouldn't say a user-facing bug that prevents collection of revenue is minor.
It's also a little alarming this isn't caught via QA or automated tests. Did this ever work? What other stuff is slipping through? Are we sure the report even escaped support and got triaged?
At work, the platform I have to deal with has dozens of fields on every request and response that are specific to Brazil!
> Had a similar experience with Tinder
But I agree with your overall point.
From the issue as described, the value "visa" worked, but "visadankort" didn't. Denmark's earlier, national debit card system is called DanKort. Nowadays, almost all DanKort cards are issued through Visa, so they are "Visa DanKort" -- within Denmark, there's the option to bypass some sort of fee for a lower cost of processing.
Presumably the value "visadankort" is there to distinguish these cards. However, they can be processed exactly as normal Visa cards.
This is not unique to Denmark, there are a list of card prefixes like this (see 4571 for DanKort[1]), but perhaps the different processing fees in unusual.
[1] https://www.stevemorse.org/ssn/List_of_Bank_Identification_N...
This has not been my experience.
If you work at a company where it's possible, I strongly suggest shadowing a supporter for a day. You'll leave with a 5 page long rage-list of issues that weren't adequately captured (and would take you a few minutes to knock out) and a new relationship established that will help unblock that bottleneck of information flow.
IME, this is in part because supporters aren't as familiar with the technical aspects and don't know how to frame the issues they encounter in a way that would get traction with either PMs or engineers. As such are not well prioritized relative to issues that are fleshed out technically. I've worked at a company where supporters were spending huge amounts of time resolving issues that I knocked out in 5 minutes after shadowing and materially improved their operational efficiency.
In a word, what's missing is a culture of ownership.
Tinder doesn't offer much customer support. They're definitely not spending a substantial amount of time on issues that affect the subset of users that use Danish cards, don't pay through the app, and have one of the cards that has this issue. If you told me the number of affected people was under 5,000, I would believe you.
I'm curious who handles those emails. I'm putting myself in the position of a software engineer at Tinder, I personally would have gotten care-mad enough to fix it. I go out of my way to get to know customer support folks where I work so I can get better insight into how people are actually using the product and where the pain points lie.
People who have already demonstrated they're trying to give you money is a relatively known payoff when that bug is fixed. "New features" that may never see the light of day, or may actually have a negative revenue impact... those are somehow sexier and often manage to take priority over mundane issues like... hundreds of peoples' payments failing over a month.
A permanent new revenue stream from an entire country for the price of 1/16 of one employee's workday.
What kind of fires are burning at Tinder for that to not be a no brainer?
Side note: if there are any devs here from Tinder, I recommend you go fix this on your own initiative and get yourself some quantifiable money made for your employer for your next performance review.
2. Fires are almost always burning when you're supporting an app with millions of users expecting instant functionality, including instant messaging. They're also constantly working against bots and spammers.
Some companies do what's right. Some only prioritize based on revenue maximization.
Locking out an entire country is clearly wrong. Only prioritizing for revenue maximization is only ambiguously right.
It's not like fixing a bug is going to bankrupt Tinder.
2. Tinder is constantly at war with bots and scammers. You have no way to know that fixing a CC issue for a tiny fraction of users is more ethical than their other bugs.
There are intangible, non-quantifiable benefits to doing things better. Our inability to concoct a price is not a defensible reason to let entropy and chaos win. Sometimes Freedom Markets™ just need some TLC.
Not saying you support the revenue-only model btw :)