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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

To anyone who reads this, works in Mailchimp and happens to be in a leadership position at the company, sincerely, it would be nice to see you go bankrupt and fuck right off the face of the landscape. You don't even have the sheer size pretexts of Google, for example, to justify such terrible responsiveness, shitty customer service and generally awful account suspension and service practices. Is it simple laziness or a sharper sort of contempt for your own customers? Disgusting tendency among too many tech companies that reach any moderate size.

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> You don't even have the sheer size pretexts of Google

There is no excuse. None. Not for google. Not for anyone. In fact the other way is far more justified. When you're as massively profitable and market dominating as google if you don't respond well and fast you need to be broken up. Now. And Google clearly do need to be broken up. But for many, many other reasons too.

Just to hell with this excuse of "we're so successful we don't need to try because you're nothing to us!" Straight to hell. "You make so much money and dominate the market so comprehensively we must hold you to a lower standard." Seriously.

I completely agree with you on this, my point in my original comment was that Mailchimp doesn't even have this ambiguous and very shifty pretext of it being difficult to handle customer service with a humen response when your users number in the billions. Google has no excuses either at its enormous size and scope, and with annual revenue of $258 billion for 2021 (and a very healthy percentage of that being profits) they could at least make a sincere effort. It is however even less justified in a company like Mailchimp, whose users actively pay for the expectation of decent service and number in the low millions instead of billions.

No. More justified in a smaller company /not/ less. But very, very little more.

Dumping mailchimp? Ok. Dump google? Good luck with that one. You see it?

Quite the opposite. Logistics matter. even to a Google, scaling human responses for user problems is extremely difficult when those users are in the billions. There will always be lots of difficulties unless AI gets radically better. I still think we fundamentally agree and Google should definitely ensure real responses at least to anyone who spends over a certain amount with it, but to me Mailchimp has far fewer excuses. These are paying customers of a multimillion dollar company and only a fraction of such people require support at any given time. Yet they still treat these users like shit sometimes for no good reason.

edit: and I have dumped Google. I use it for exactly nothing important in my life. It is possible and doable.

Mailchimp is a multi billion dollar company with 15 million + customers now. How many support people do you think it takes to respond to hundreds of thousands of customers? I think you're asking for India style call center customer service instead of their local customer service. I imagine the amount of people who use Mailchimp and need support is much larger than you think. The name of company and brand probably attracts the majority of their customers. What sort of technically adept customers do you think make decisions based on something looking fun?

> I use it for exactly nothing important in my life. It is possible and doable.

This is actually delusional. Email. You don't get a choice there. And your ad-blocking is unlikely to be 100% effective. How many websites you visit use google stuff? Never clicked on an amp link? That's just for starters. The decisions of others prevent you from living google free unless you leave modern society and find a nice place in the wild.

But more importantly, _No!_ Logistics do NOT matter at all in responsibilities. It doesn't matter how difficult it is. When you're the lynchpin in something and you don't deliver, screwing up someone's business or life to a non-trivial degree you are 100% responsible for that. You can't do it, GET OUT. "The logistics of driving drunk are really hard so it's ok when it goes wrong." Nope. It's not ok. Don't do it. The end. If you can't take responsibility for providing a critical service because you want huge scale you have zero business doing it.

Having more tolerance for smaller players trying to compete is fair. Having tolerance the market dominating force with the decreasing long run average total cost curve making billions is just madness. Break them up. Why are they in phone os development? Why isn't mail spun off from search? Why isn't 3rd party advertising spun off to a separate entity from those two? And so on.

"Because it suits their market dominance" has always been an argument for breaking up this kind of market power not in support of it.

Oh no they have the perfect excuse: "Our customers let us."

It's more like, "We donate very large amounts to your campaign, congressman..."

They could have owned the transactional mailing space with Mandrill but Mailchimp'ed it.

Having been a victim of this recently, I concur. Don't use MailChimp.

MailChimp has been bleeding talent for years. They've had bad move after bad move, and then got acquired by Intuit. Their longtime CEO just stepped down. It's essentially just a brand owned by a megacorp at this point.

> it would be nice to see you go bankrupt

I would prefer that they fix their problems instead. They have 800 employees. I don't want those people to lose their jobs.

> I would prefer that they fix their problems instead. They have 800 employees. I don't want those people to lose their jobs.

This thinking is how one rationalizes "bailing out" companies which have objectively failed in the market and should suffer the consequences.

Never has it been so easy to form a business and employ people. Gone are the days of a business being some kind of precious thing worth preserving because forming one is so involved.

Let the failures experience negative consequences, it's how we improve as a society.

This is a freaking email-sending company. They can fix their problems without firing their whole staff.

You're thinking everything is some kind of an existential crisis.

> You're thinking everything is some kind of an existential crisis.

You're the one thinking a company going bankrupt and 800 employees being out of work is some kind of existential crisis.

Companies fail, employees lose jobs get humbled and go find new work with lessons learned. It's how this is supposed to work.

Those people would probably find new jobs the same week in the current market

Ah yes. They'll all just probably find new jobs.

What is the "current market" that you're talking about?

When a company goes bankrupt they give maybe 2 paychecks. How long until these people get new jobs? Maybe the company gives 4 paychecks? Still, how long is that going to last?

EDIT:

I'm seeing now that nobody on HN has ever been on the receiving end of your company going bankrupt. Carry on.

(Sincerity not snarkiness, and wasn't a downvoter) Do you not have an emergency fund? It was always important, but hopefully 2020 was a wake-up for most people.

> the current market

The one with all the layoffs and hiring freezes?

The one with very low unemployment, newly popular concept of remote work, and shortage of skilled tech workers.

Bankruptcy means shareholders and debt holders lose their lunch, not employees lose their jobs, if the company is still viable under new ownership.

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