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

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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #63
varjag wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, editing a hard coded list. Does one need a chisel for that?

Depending on the amount of technical debt, it could very well be a number of hard coded lists in a number of projects that may be under multiple teams and which may or may not include first party code. It’s not that fixes like this should be hard, it’s that sometimes they are hard despite themselves, for organizational reasons. Edit: just for clarity, I’d love to fix this bug myself. I also have a million other easy…

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by jedberg »

varjag wrote: post #70
jedberg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how things work in the real world. Sure, the fix itself might take 30 minutes. But then you have to validate it. And run a canary. And crosscheck your revenue numbers to make sure it didn't have an adverse affect elsewhere. That's a lot of work for something that will probably mean very little extra revenue.

I assume they already have the quality assurance pipeline in place at Tinder and don't need to reinvent it from scratch for every bug report.

Of course they do. But it still takes time, effort, and resources to run through the QA pipeline.

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

#74

Post by smt88 »

Tomminn wrote: post #69
smt88 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is absurd. The return on investment for a bug like this must be extraordinarily high. The OP can fix it themselves by changing a string in the developer console. A permanent new revenue stream from an entire country for the price of 1/16 of one employee's workday. What kind of fires are burning at Tinder for that to not be a no brainer? Side note: if there are any devs here from Tinder, I recommend you go fix th…

1. It's not an entire country. It's people who use a Danish card and can't/won't subscribe through the Play Store. That's probably a tiny number of people.

2. Fires are almost always burning when you're supporting an app with millions of users expecting instant functionality, including instant messaging. They're also constantly working against bots and spammers.

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

#75

Post by smt88 »

arcticbull wrote: post #51
smt88 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you mean "customer support" when you say "supporter". If not, please disregard.

Tinder doesn't offer much customer support. They're definitely not spending a substantial amount of time on issues that affect the subset of users that use Danish cards, don't pay through the app, and have one of the cards that has this issue. If you told me the number of affected people was under 5,000, I would believe you.

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

#76

Post by lopmotr »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #17
lordnacho wrote: post #14

Well it would be nice it it were fixed, but aren't people in Denmark wary of using the three special characters æ, ø and å for this reason? IIRC it's normal to have borsen.dk instead of børsen.dk, Denmark's equivalent of the FT. And probably a few others as well, I'd expect any website connected to Århus to use some other similar spelling. Also LinkedIn doesn't seem very easy to deal with in general. I've been trying…

They shouldn't have to be though; internationalized domain names have been a standard for a decade now. Browsers, DNS servers and web servers should be on top of that. I mean sure, 10+ years ago they would have used plain ascii domain names, but nowadays they should be free to user their own language and script. At least two thirds of the world population and internet users does not use latin script.

Everyone uses Latin script because too much depends on it. Even "https" and ".dk".

Localized scripts are exclusionary to everyone else who has no hope of typing them or even identifying them in a unicode table to copy and paste.

A funny situation happens in China where even the most computer illiterate old person can type latin letters on a PC with enough patience just by matching appearance to their keyboard, but many old people are utterly blocked from typing Chinese characters because that requires learning a special input method which is almost a whole nother language itself. Before smartphones, they had to write them with a stylus on a writing tablet to get around this problem.

Half the English alphabet is excluded from domain names too. When are we getting capital letters? Let's just tolerate never having them and not worry, same as those other languages' odd letters. ExpertSexChange.com and PenisLand.net could use them.

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

#78

Post by matttb »

mhh__ wrote: post #39
nottorp wrote: post #22

At some point Linkedin changed their site from something that at least worked to some javascript that i can actually watch loading and assembling the page because it's so slow. And you expect ... support for internationalized domain names?

When this happens is it literally just companies trying to save money so they only need to hire JS developers? Or are static sites not webscale anymore? The web framework I use for my personal stuff just takes templates in and fills it with whatever a request requires, and it's definitely easier than dealing with JS wat-isms.

Pretty sure it's just to combat scraping

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

#79

Post by anonunivgrad »

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…

This kind of hyper-optimization misses the forest for the trees. You need to have some love for your product and if you do, you do not let issues like this fester. Your bean counters can’t capture the full complexity of the world. They can’t capture the general sense of “shittiness” that users feel when your product fails in stupid ways and you don’t fix it. They can’t appreciate how that feeling snowballs into the success of a competitor five or ten years down the line.

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

#80

Post by arcticbull »

smt88 wrote: post #75
arcticbull wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think you mean "customer support" when you say "supporter". If not, please disregard. Tinder doesn't offer much customer support. They're definitely not spending a substantial amount of time on issues that affect the subset of users that use Danish cards, don't pay through the app, and have one of the cards that has this issue. If you told me the number of affected people was under 5,000, I would believe you.

Yep, the place I used to work referred to "customer support" as "supporters." I assumed the term was used more broadly than it appears to be, my bad.

I'm curious who handles those emails. I'm putting myself in the position of a software engineer at Tinder, I personally would have gotten care-mad enough to fix it. I go out of my way to get to know customer support folks where I work so I can get better insight into how people are actually using the product and where the pain points lie.

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