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.”

You don’t belong to either group. What does this make you?

You may have belonged to one of those groups in the past, or maybe you will someday. I certainly have. Many of the more seasoned folks on HN have.

Stuff goes wrong, random internet people jump on the opportunity to speculate and say wildly off-the-mark comments, and the engineers trying to keep the ship from sinking have to sit quietly for fear of making the PR backlash worse.

Most or all of your replies are to people who hallucinate things you didn’t say. Your patience is inspiring.

I was interviewing a dev candidate some years ago and they were totally lost trying to traverse a tree on the whiteboard. I kept helping them get unblocked, because my philosophy is that anyone can get stuck once, but if I’m supposed decide whether to hire you, I should get the most/best data I can.

Another person was observing the interview, for training purposes, and afterwards said to me: “Do you have kids? You have so much patience!”