[compiler-guy]

I have no idea who is right or wrong as to the capabilities. But I believe his story that he couldn't get it working. And I believe your statement that it can be made to work.

When very smart people can't get your product to work as advertised, that's a problem with either the advertising, or the documentation, or maybe the default settings. Or maybe it needs the source data set up in a very specific way.

That kind of plays into the larger point of the essay that outsourcing this sort of thing still requires significant internal knowledge, and therefore may not be as cheap as it looks at first glance.

[georgewfraser]

In general, I absolutely agree with you. It’s basically an instance of “the customer is always right”: if a smart customer can’t get our product working, there is a problem with the product. But this post made a much bolder (and wrong) claim: “the product has a number of major design flaws that mean that it literally cannot work”.

[Dylan16807]

You went too far in your pushback though.

"part of what’s going on in this post is an arrogant guy who thinks he knows better than everyone, coming to snap conclusions that other people’s work is broken"

He's probably wrong about why it was broken, but it was broken.

And it's not exactly "arrogance" to give the best explanation you have, in a blog post about something else, while not mentioning the company name.

[lmm]

> He's probably wrong about why it was broken, but it was broken.

That's going too far. If the customer misunderstands the product or misreads the documentation, that's something worth addressing, but "broken" is not an informative way to describe it.

[hipadev23]

Dan never called out Fivetran, he wrote a couple sentences about problems he experienced with an anonymous ETL provider. That was it. Hell we don't even know that he's actually talking about Fivetran.

George however should not allowed to come to HN and start talking shit about random people who had the professional courtesy to never even mention the provider in question. The fact that his post isn't flagged, is highly upvoted, and dang hasn't swooped in to chastise him is a prime example of why HN is so fucking ridiculous and hypocritical.

[Dylan16807]

If, sure. Do we have any reason to think the problem was a misunderstanding or a misreading?

[lmm]

We know that Luu was misunderstanding at least some things, since he gave an inaccurate description of what was happening. Given that context, I find it more plausible that he was also misunderstanding other things, than that the thing was broken for him despite other people seeing it working. Even if you weigh the likelihood differently from me, you must admit that that's a possibility, so concluding that it was broken because Luu thought it was broken is at a minimum premature.

[Dylan16807]

Given the other comments talking about problems here, we don't know for sure if it was inaccurate. But even if it was, "plausible" that he was misunderstanding other things is a hell of a lot weaker than the way your comment above treated it as the truth of the matter.

Overall I think it's pretty unlikely that it wasn't broken.