Didn't they just fire a bunch of people working on a tax product?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/stripe-layoffs-taxjar-tech...
Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
21–30 of 211 posts
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#22Don't get a job at a SaaS company if you want WLB, kiddos
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry for the issues here—could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
Why is complaining on HN necessary to get proper customer support?
Because otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket.
If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#24willing to bet that 99.999% uptime is just static text, because 5+ hours out of 2190 hours is not 99.999%
From @koopajah on discord: "We don't really drop nines if one specific feature is having issues". Pretty convenient payment processing is just a "feature" of a payment infrastructure SaaS
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are processors like Square any better?
Possibly. I'm still angry at Square because I emailed them repeatedly 10+ years ago telling them to add gateway processing (which they didn't have), and they took forever. Stripe's business shouldn't even exist. Square had a head start and should have just made a payment gateway/API and eaten their lunch. They absolutely had an internal API, quite obviously, so not productizing it and letting a whole new business in…
That's pretty funny in hindsight.
> If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support.
Also what we're considering right about now
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#26Didn't they just fire a bunch of people working on a tax product? https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/stripe-layoffs-taxjar-tech...
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Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#27willing to bet that 99.999% uptime is just static text, because 5+ hours out of 2190 hours is not 99.999%
It is not static text. Calcuated automatically.
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#28Stripe has been pretty bad for us lately. Downtime yes, but also slashed our corporate card limits with no explanation and refused to restore them despite our bank writing letters supporting our position. We've been with them for 10 years and their customer service is atrocious on this position, which is unfortunate since historically it's been quite good. We went through the arduous process of switching our corporat…
Are processors like Square any better?
Better in what way? I personally would never use a Square product (I feel the entire org has major ethical issues) however other players in this space include Braintree, Amazon Payments and a host of 3rd parties - although 3rd parties are discontinuing internet based direct gateway access such as CardConnect.
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possibly. I'm still angry at Square because I emailed them repeatedly 10+ years ago telling them to add gateway processing (which they didn't have), and they took forever. Stripe's business shouldn't even exist. Square had a head start and should have just made a payment gateway/API and eaten their lunch. They absolutely had an internal API, quite obviously, so not productizing it and letting a whole new business in…
That's pretty funny in hindsight. > If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support. Also what we're considering right about now
Even I can see the humor in it. You are right!
I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium?
Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over the last year the customer service has gone to complete shit in our experience and the rates are still uncompetitively high. Frustrating.
Re: Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is complaining on HN necessary to get proper customer support?
Because otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket. If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.
I understand this position but after going from support-intensive startup to FAANG, the difference is scale subtly tipping the balance in small ways.
There's no equivalent for "overhearing a customer problem" at FAANG scale.
It would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets.
About 0.5% of support tickets are interesting enough to be a case study the way this user has offered. At both large and small scale.