Did any of the complaining people actually pay RH for their service or is this 1st world entitlement?
An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
241–250 of 295 posts
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes you just have to cut them some slack. Have you engineered a highly available cluster before? I'm not talking about the hot-standby postgres master that gets called on once every 2 years, but I'm talking about a 180 node Cassandra cluster thats doing 15,000 writes a second 24/7 and peaking at 60,000 writes a second every day, and you have to do node replacements every week or two because of the high load. Or…
Does the duration of their downtime suggest a “1/1000” unmonitored oversight? Or is it more like a threshold that was meet and probably could/should have been observed? And FWIW, they have down time every day and weekend, at least in a virtual sense; the load does drop off in a very real sense too. You are spiritually correct, they should pull together and sort it out, and they owe nobody money here (don’t use a disc…
As with any big system, spinning it up is much harder than bringing it down. After an outage, they have to stay offline to audit their systems to ensure that all the nodes are synchronized, all queued trades have been processed, and no accounts are in invalid states. I'm sure they could have restarted in a matter of minutes, but the risk is ridiculously high.
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#243I mean this is OK as an apology, but is there an actual post mortem anywhere was can read?
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google doesn’t target zero downtime. The marginal cost is too high. For important services (like Search page and ads) they aim for 5 nines uptime (99.999%), which translates to 5 minutes of downtime per year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
As an ex telco guy all I can say is "amateurs" :-)
And not a mention of Erlang at all? ;)
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#245On Reddit I've been trying to ask this ELI5:
Why would you use RH instead of a normal, mainstream brokerage like Vanguard, Fidelity, etc that already has (1) an app and (2) commission-free trades?
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#246On Reddit I've been trying to ask this ELI5: Why would you use RH instead of a normal, mainstream brokerage like Vanguard, Fidelity, etc that already has (1) an app and (2) commission-free trades?
Easy answer: As someone who's used Vanguard for index funds and the like for a couple decades now, I had no idea they had an app or commission-free trades. They don't market this at all.
As a secondary answer, normal, mainstream brokerages have pretty bad tech, tbh. I don't expect it to be worse than Robinhood in terms of things like security, and I expect UX to be worse. (Side note: I just discovered that Vanguard actually has a secret security key option hidden under Account maintenance, so I can finally switch from sms 2fa. +1 to Vanguard.)
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#247On Reddit I've been trying to ask this ELI5: Why would you use RH instead of a normal, mainstream brokerage like Vanguard, Fidelity, etc that already has (1) an app and (2) commission-free trades?
My brother has a Fidelity account and apparently even he was blocked from putting in orders online last Thursday, so I'm not sure they're immune either.
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything has outages. Is this the new narrative now that we've moved on from the leap year thing? That RobinHood is just a bunch of shitty engineers? There are no public details about the root cause. I think RH is bad for people in general, but this pile-on is outrageous.
Robinhood crashing isn't an isolated unfortunate "well it happens to everyone" moment. RH has constantly had issues at least since I started using it over a year ago. I didn't notice it really at first, but I also didn't know much about anything trading related back then. It didn't take long though for me to have my first "incident" where my market orders were seemingly vanishing into the abyss as the underlying move…
Selectively delaying market orders by minutes would allow easy arbitrage! Very illegal and very profitable.
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything has outages. Is this the new narrative now that we've moved on from the leap year thing? That RobinHood is just a bunch of shitty engineers? There are no public details about the root cause. I think RH is bad for people in general, but this pile-on is outrageous.
There are a couple of situations where outages are not normal or acceptable: 1. Dealing with other people's money 2. Monitoring/managing other people's health
Ok.
Can you describe to me how you’d design RH to ensure 100% uptime?
“Failure is unacceptable” and “failure implies total incompetence” are different statements.
Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it was obvious the market was recovering in a big way Was it? Markets started up today but ended way lower.
It was more then just that though. Robinhood was displaying incorrect market data for the few people who could see it. (at least on monday) So now you also have people making decisions based on the wrong data. Honestly I dont see how this doesnt turn into a lawsuit.
I’ve observed very wrong prices on both vanguard and google finance several times over the last year.