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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

helmstedt.dk

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Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#51

Post by arcticbull »

smt88 wrote: post #33
johannes1234321 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what the cost of that fix would be. Once the ticket reaches the developer it's probably quickly done and pays for itself with a handful registrations. However getting from support to a developer is the complex part. (Support has to understand the issue and then it has to be routed to the correct team ...)

I completely understand why you see this as a 30-min fix, and therefore they should just knock it out. That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed. The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the sam…

> That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed.

This has not been my experience.

If you work at a company where it's possible, I strongly suggest shadowing a supporter for a day. You'll leave with a 5 page long rage-list of issues that weren't adequately captured (and would take you a few minutes to knock out) and a new relationship established that will help unblock that bottleneck of information flow.

IME, this is in part because supporters aren't as familiar with the technical aspects and don't know how to frame the issues they encounter in a way that would get traction with either PMs or engineers. As such are not well prioritized relative to issues that are fleshed out technically. I've worked at a company where supporters were spending huge amounts of time resolving issues that I knocked out in 5 minutes after shadowing and materially improved their operational efficiency.

In a word, what's missing is a culture of ownership.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#52

Post by smt88 »

reaperducer wrote: post #40
smt88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to assume "supporting Danish credit cards" is lower on their list of revenue-impacting issues than you expect. If Denmark were a US state, it wouldn't even be in the top 20 in terms of population. If you assume that Denmark has lower usage of Tinder than US, CA, or UK, and then you assume that not all Danish people are paying with Danish credit cards (many of them would be using Play Store subscriptions, whi…

lower on their list of revenue-impacting issues Some companies do what's right. Some only prioritize based on revenue maximization. Locking out an entire country is clearly wrong. Only prioritizing for revenue maximization is only ambiguously right. It's not like fixing a bug is going to bankrupt Tinder.

1. This isn't locking out an entire country.

2. Tinder is constantly at war with bots and scammers. You have no way to know that fixing a CC issue for a tiny fraction of users is more ethical than their other bugs.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#53

Post by arcticbull »

quicklyfrozen wrote: post #50
varjag wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

How is it dysfunction to keep your devs focused on the tasks you've already identified as the most important? I can't imagine how producing a PR for this with test cases, getting it reviewed, then shepherding through a typical QA/Staging/Prod pipeline would take less then a day for any code base of reasonable complexity. Perhaps it wouldn't literally take 8 hours, but the focus shift of working on this would likely k…

> How is it dysfunction to keep your devs focused on the tasks you've already identified as the most important?

Because software is never that cut and dried. There's what supporters think is important, what PMs think is important, what front-line engineers think is important and what leadership thinks is important.

These priorities are frequently different and their actual impact is quite often disjoint from their position in the organization.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#54

Post by xmprt »

smt88 wrote: post #18
jansommer wrote: post #3

I'm not surprised the author can't convince LinkedIn to change anything. Had a similar experience with Tinder where Paying in their web application using a danish credit card failed because their cc service returned "visadankort", which had to be changed to "visa" through the developer console for the payment to go through. Got tired of that and filed a bug. Oh the battle it took to actually convince them that an ent…

I'd have to assume "supporting Danish credit cards" is lower on their list of revenue-impacting issues than you expect. If Denmark were a US state, it wouldn't even be in the top 20 in terms of population. If you assume that Denmark has lower usage of Tinder than US, CA, or UK, and then you assume that not all Danish people are paying with Danish credit cards (many of them would be using Play Store subscriptions, whi…

Companies spend thousands on things that have dubious impact on the bottom line. This is something that has a direct and measurable impact. If the solution for the parent commenter was as simple as changing something in developer console, then the change for tinder shouldn't take more than a few days or a week.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#55

Post by [deleted] »

helstegt wrote: post #36
kevincox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link provided was https:// so it would be a serious security issue if it downgraded to http. It is the website that is broken (or at least does not support that link).

I used coronaprøver.dk to illustrate the point. The more authoritative URL is coronaprover.dk and coronaprøver.dk is registered to prevent domain squatting/phishing attempts. Although they probably should have made a solution without certificate errors.

[deleted]

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#56

Post by tsimionescu »

nottorp wrote: post #23
diggan wrote: post #2

As a funny side note, I cannot load https://xn--coronaprver-ngb.dk/ in Brave, which also seems to be confused by Internationalised domain names. This is what I see: > This server could not prove that it is xn--coronaprver-ngb.dk; its security certificate is from *.coronaprover.dk. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection. Edit: Hah! And HN is also guilty of being confused b…

My Firefox complains about the certificate too.

Yes, because the certificate is not valid for the site they linked to - it's only valid for the ASCII-named site. Everything seems to be working as intended here on the browser side.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#57

Post by ajb413 »

I had a similar problem on LinkedIn when I tried to share an SDK I was working on. It's called Compound.js. The post editor thought that "Compound.js" is a URL, which 404ed, breaking the post preview, which was supposed to link to the actual URL which was later in the post body.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#58

Post by specialist »

smt88 wrote: post #18
jansommer wrote: post #3

I'm not surprised the author can't convince LinkedIn to change anything. Had a similar experience with Tinder where Paying in their web application using a danish credit card failed because their cc service returned "visadankort", which had to be changed to "visa" through the developer console for the payment to go through. Got tired of that and filed a bug. Oh the battle it took to actually convince them that an ent…

I'd have to assume "supporting Danish credit cards" is lower on their list of revenue-impacting issues than you expect. If Denmark were a US state, it wouldn't even be in the top 20 in terms of population. If you assume that Denmark has lower usage of Tinder than US, CA, or UK, and then you assume that not all Danish people are paying with Danish credit cards (many of them would be using Play Store subscriptions, whi…

That's like using poor ROI to argue against curb cuts.

There are intangible, non-quantifiable benefits to doing things better. Our inability to concoct a price is not a defensible reason to let entropy and chaos win. Sometimes Freedom Markets™ just need some TLC.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#59

Post by specialist »

quicklyfrozen wrote: post #50
varjag wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

How is it dysfunction to keep your devs focused on the tasks you've already identified as the most important? I can't imagine how producing a PR for this with test cases, getting it reviewed, then shepherding through a typical QA/Staging/Prod pipeline would take less then a day for any code base of reasonable complexity. Perhaps it wouldn't literally take 8 hours, but the focus shift of working on this would likely k…

Minimizing turn upkeep (over head) is worthwhile. Ignoring it is ludicrous.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#60

Post by mgkimsal »

smt88 wrote: post #33
johannes1234321 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what the cost of that fix would be. Once the ticket reaches the developer it's probably quickly done and pays for itself with a handful registrations. However getting from support to a developer is the complex part. (Support has to understand the issue and then it has to be routed to the correct team ...)

I completely understand why you see this as a 30-min fix, and therefore they should just knock it out. That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed. The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the sam…

"features" is the wildcard there.

People who have already demonstrated they're trying to give you money is a relatively known payoff when that bug is fixed. "New features" that may never see the light of day, or may actually have a negative revenue impact... those are somehow sexier and often manage to take priority over mundane issues like... hundreds of peoples' payments failing over a month.

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