Bryan,
I logged in this afternoon while on vacation and found your post. A pleasant surprise.
Thank you for your answers. I commend you for taking on the questions. I also do not wish to get into an extended debate. Suffice it to say that I found several of the answers refreshing, but a couple of them were very troubling. To wit:
1. On #5, I gave you the exact words that were attributed to Jill, but you dodged #6 by saying you didn't really know what Jill said (I suppose you could ask her...). I meant by #6 to pose the question, is the statement attributed to Jill true or false. It's the "we immediately fixed the problem" part of her statement that disturbs me, because it was clear to me as a user that the problem was not fixed, and your answer to #11 suggests that you knew all along that the userid problem had not been fixed in that the root cause had not been identified. And we, the users/content providers, were struggling with a site where it sure didn't seem like the problems were "fixed." Studying how Intel and Cisco have handled past major performance issues on a PR level would be an instructive exercise for you to cascade down through your organization. Stuff happens, everybody knows that and will tolerate it up to a point. It's how the stuff is handled that separates the good organizations from the bad. When your B-school alma mater does case studies of corporate crisis management and damage control, Intel and Cisco will be on the "this is how you do it" side. SI should strive to get there in the future too.
2. In the "Did Busby change his post" questions (8-9), I did not mean that he posted something and then changed it, but rather that he had written something and, before posting it, been ordered to change it. (My experiences make me a highly suspicious character, I guess <g>). I think your answers imply that whatever changes he made were done on his own, and I can certainly accept your answer on that level, but I found it a little troubling that the answers were being couched in terms of him not changing or removing anything from "a posted message." The thrust of the question was, did he write something which was ordered sanitized before it was posted in the first place? I think your answer was, "no, that didn't happen," but in a literal sense we were talking past one another a little.
3. Your answer to #11 really, really concerns me. Not the answer so much as the sequence of events and SI thought process it describes. I gather that SI essentially knew that the userid problem might very well resurface and chose, deliberately, to "test" that notion on a live site so that the programmers could "watch for it." Moreover, because that was the plan, SI was reluctant to issue a statement until it had a chance to do that. I am willing to stand corrected, but that sounds an awful lot like crashing a car into a wall, extracting the injured from the wreckage, then, in an effort to figure out why the car crashed, putting the injured back into the car, revving it up and running into the same wall all over again. What the hell, they're already injured anyhow, what will a few more abrasions matter? (Feel free to take exception to this analogy, I just wanted to inform you how that answer made me feel.) Would it have not been better to cut off the site's link to the outside world but leave it up internally, then see why it was happening and fixing it? (I am not a programmer by any means, but that alternative seems logical to me.)
4. As for hiring more programmers (or perhaps better ones), I meant the question as a way to encourage you to increase headcount and salaries. Which you probably understand is the real issue.
These are all quibbles, and in my view important ones. But I don't want to lose sight of the fact that, in the course of a difficult week and some troubling questions, you did make an honest effort to answer them and provided answers even though the questions were uncomfortable to say the least. I really, really respect that.
We can all sit back in our armchairs and nitpick and criticize (I guess you already know we can do that <g>), but in the end that doesn't do anybody any good. It is solving the crisis and improving the processes and dealing with the damage that was left behind that does good. I thought your answers for the most part were a constructive way to help accomplish that. Thank you. |
