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Comment by StressedDev | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the moral of the story is devops and operations staff need to keep all payments, secret rotations, certificate expirations, etc. on a calendar so no one forgets to pay the bills. I hope the employee who forgot to pay the bill learns from this.

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Ops is an interesting domain, nobody knows what they do until they don't do it; so everyone wants the jobs to disappear, and when they do it's fun what happens.

I'm beyond certain that someone will reply "use a cloud provider", which is ironic, as cloud providers just concentrate these kinds of ops people and charge you through the nose (often an order of magnitude more in my experience) than having people responsible.

Unpopular opinion, probably, because people seem to like dehumanising operations issues on this site- sure, things can be automated, but at some point there's got to be some responsibility.

^This is the most sensible understanding of the space, in my opinion

I agree, ops is like a toilet. Nobody cares, until it does not work.

If a technical person is even close to involved with paying for a SaaS Discourse forum hosting something is extremely wrong. This is part of business operations or finance. This is already a "cloud provider". It's the same as paying for Google Workspace or an HR platform.

I would expect more professional operations considering the very high salaries of Mozilla foundation management and I would not blame any particular employee for this problem.

More likely no-one "forgot" to pay. Typically administration optimizes payments. Getting a large corp to pay a small contractor or service provider at all let alone on time can prove to be a nightmare.

You do know most companies in the world have a department specifically for handling financial matters, right? (Hint: it's not the IT department)

Also, I don't know if you're aware of this, but technology has advanced sufficiently that nobody needs to manually pay a monthly bill anymore. I know it sounds crazy, but there's these things called "bill pay", and "recurring credit card changes", that have existed for 20ish years now. Might want to read up on the latest trends!

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