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Comment by sirwhinesalot | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why I clicked on this beyond just knowing it was going to be another Mozilla trainwreck and not being able to look away. But what was truly stunning to me was this comment thread. There are people here actually defending the following response:

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?

This is horrifically patronizing after someone's volunteer work was effectively destroyed (as laid out in the list of grievances), but there are people here asking "how is it patronizing? seems perfectly reasonable to me".

It's one of those "they live among us" moments, where you realize that you're surrounded by psychopaths. It's not even malice, they're not intentionally being assholes, they just have no empathy.

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> This is horrifically patronizing after someone's volunteer work was effectively destroyed

This, 100 %.

"Your bot just destroyed 20 years of my work."

"Naaaw, sorry you feel that way! Let's hop on a quick call so I can explain to you why you're wrong, mkay?"

> It's one of those "they live among us" moments, where you realize that you're surrounded by psychopaths.

Or has this kind of corporate language/attitude become so common that people just gave up fighting it? If so, that's…terrifying.

Yup, you get it.

I wonder if cultural differences might play a role. I'm not from the USA, maybe this way of communicating is perfectly normal there and the rest of the word is just utterly baffled by it?

Where I'm from this is how someone who has no respect for you deals with an inconvenience. Acknowledge no wrongdoing, make the situation about emotions rather than actions (sorry you feel this way), shift the conversation from a public space to a private space with no records.

I don’t know, I feel the Western cooperate culture found it reasonable to completely fuck people over without even understanding and then blame them for it

Talking face-to-face is absolutely the right response, though. Would you have preferred a canned apology?

The “right” response is owning your mistake, apologizing, rolling back AND talking face to face.

Patronizing “sorry you got your feelings hurt” responses are pretty much canned apologies.

1. Turn off bot

2. Revert bot's changes

3. Ask to have call for feedback, while expressing fault for deploying bot to prod without collaboration & conceding to making this bot opt-in

(They may not have power to do 1 & 2, but that's a sign of an org not empowering their support team)

"I'm sorry you feel that way" is a canned non-apology, worse than a canned apology. At least a canned apology admits fault.

I wouldn't want to get into a call with someone with that attitude. If I'm quitting because no consideration was given to me or my work, and the first response I get shows no consideration to me, my work, or even acknowledge my list of grievances, a "quick call" is the last thing I feel like getting on.

In fact, even that word, "quick", is insulting, because there's no way this is getting fixed with a "quick" call. "Quick call" implies the grievances are minor. More insults.

No it's not! There's a support forum right there, use it. The only reason they want a call is because they want to try to grind down the volunteer while having everything off the record.

Talking face-to-face about what though? Apparently it's about "what you're struggling with", not "what we fucked up". There's a complete inability to admit any fault in this message, so the conversation is already primed to be bullshit. I would expect such a conversation to be a waste of my time and would never agree to it.

No, the right response was to talk about it before making the changes.

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