[thanatos_dem]

That’d be unrealistic for any company to claim, and if any company I worked with did claim that I would run for the hills.

That’s akin to saying “we’ll never ship a bug”, or “we have an SLO of 100%”. That’s impossible for anyone to claim. Same goes for the response handling. There is clearly a lot of room for improvement there, but if you’re insisting on not getting canned response, that means a human needs to be involved at some point. Humans will at times be slow to respond. Humans will at times make mistakes. This is just an unavoidable reality.

I get that mob mentality is strong when shit hits the fan publicly, but have a bit of empathy and think about what reasonable solutions you may come up with if you were to be in their situation, rather than asking for a “magic bullet”.

I could see a good response here being an overhaul of their incident response policy, especially in terms of L1 support. Probably by beefing up the L2 staffing, and escalating issues more often and more quickly. L2 support is generally product engineers rather than dedicated support staff/contractors, so it’s more expensive to do for sure, but having engineers closer to the “front line” in responding to issues closes the loop better for integrating fixes into the product, and identifying erroneous behavior more quickly.

[pdimitar]

Sure, me and a lot of others react rather strongly in these situations. I agree with that but you already seem to understand the reasons.

However, can you say with a straight face that the very generic message left here by DO's CTO instills confidence in you about how will they handle such situations in the future?

Techies hate lawyer/corporate weasel talk. Least that person could do was do their best to speak plainly without promising the sky and the moon.

[thanatos_dem]

I would prefer a generic message and a promise for follow up once all the facts are known over a rushed response that may be incorrect.

I’m an engineering manager in an infrastructure team (not at all affiliated with Digital Ocean, tho full disclosure, I do have one droplet for my personal website). I know how postmortems generally work, and it’s messy enough to track down root cause even when it’s not some complex algorithm like fraud detection going off the rails.

I’d rather get slow information than misinformation, but I understand the frustration in not being able to see the inner working of how an incident is being handled.

[pdimitar]

I applaud people like you. Seriously.

And I agree with your premise. However, my practice has shown that postmortems are watered-down evasive PR talk, many times.

If you look at this through the eyes of a potential startup CTO, wouldn't you be worried about the lack of transparency?

And finally, why is such an abrupt account lockdown even on the table, at all? You can't claim you are doing your best when it's very obvious that you are just leaving your customers at the mercy of very crude algorithms -- and those, let's be clear on that, could have been created without ever locking down an account without a human approval at the final step.

What I'm saying is that even at this early stage when we know almost nothing, it's evident that this CTO here is not being sincere. It seems DO just wants to maximally automate away support, to their customers' detriment.

Whatever the postmortem ends up being it still won't change the above.

[Moru]

Our line so far has been to change provider of service if we start getting copy - paste answers from support. We always make sure we can get hold of a human on the phone even without a big uptime contract. This has so far lead us to small companies that are not overrun by free accounts used as spam or SEO accounts. That means they have no need for automatic shutdown of accounts and instead you get a phonecall if something goes wrong.

[pdimitar]

This is how I would go about it as well. But I imagine that's a big expense for non-small companies, and not only through money but through the time of valuable professionals that could have spend the time improving the bottom line.

I too value less known providers. The human factor in support is priceless.