Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this:

1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine.

2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is and aren’t likely to publicly flog someone doing their same job based on uninformed speculation. They know their own systems are Byzantine and don’t look like what random onlookers think it would look like.

So that leaves the rest, who offer insights based on how stuff works at a small scale, or better yet, pronouncements rooted in “first principles.”

The only time I worked on a project that had a live television launch, it absolutely tipped over within like 2 minutes, and people on HN and Reddit were making fun of it. And I know how hard everyone worked, and how competent they were, so I sympathize with the people in these cases. While the internet was teeing off with easy jokes, engineers were swarming on a problem that was just not resolving, PMs were pacing up and down the hallway, people were getting yelled at by leadership, etc. It's like taking all the stress and complexity of a product launch and multiplying it by 100. And the thing I'm talking about was just a website, not even a live video stream.

Those are the times when you identify who is there to help and who is there to be performative.