Story about a French company
and their culture
Check it out: https://highlighter.com/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzppn35mj33rmnua6xencd695m7jn8s4pckukpy8urhllaqnugr9x3qq34xar0wfuj6ctzda6hgttp94r8yetwvd5z6cm0d4cxzmne94m85ut289mq0lxs9a
#french
(*I changed some small details to protect the innocent)\ \ So the French company (let’s call them “Les Jeans Inc.”) had thousands of customers. \ These paying customers had a software-as-a-service contract with Les Jeans. \ Most of the customers just paid for the service itself (calculations/admin), and about 30% also took the full option to host all their stuff, including their websites and online shops, over there at Les Jeans. \ \ Now, this company has a bit of an ego problem. The priorities are mostly on having 3-hour lunches, and of course they have an in-house chef at some locations, as well as a very “cool” demeanor where technical remarks from testers like “this will be insecure” are answered with “if it goes wrong, the customer will call our helpdesk, and then-ah, we-ah just put back their stuff in 5 minutes.” \ \ A few months after I left Les Jeans, the company had a big (and largely untested) update of their software. Since they fired all the testers and the devs were mostly busy going out for lunch with their office hookups, the software went out, and immediately customers started calling in with issues. \ The hosted websites and shops were all still online, but all with blank pages. \ The content was just gone. So their usual reply was “yeah… something went wrong-ah, don’t know what, but-ah put back the old version again.” \ \ So the old version was put back. To no avail, the content of all these paying customers’ sites was still gone. The link to the backend and real data storage was gone, and the old backup didn’t help as the data itself was just deleted by the update somehow (don’t know the specifics as to why). \ Then, some clever Jean put away his baguette with "salade de crabe", and went to “work.”\ \ These geniuses realized they had just deleted the actual data from their paying customers (in reality: photos of their products, portfolios, designs…). They decided to put back the “big backup,” or as they called it, “ze sauvegarde.” \ Some dude went to search for it, and after a while realized the most recent “full backup” was… six years ago. \ Before the hosting product even existed. Then, after realizing they had just screwed up on a giant scale, the CEO (a man who was known for snappy comments, high-value branded clothing and incompetence) came to the rescue. He told everyone (including sales, support…) to drop what they were doing and go to the Wayback Machine at archive.org. \ \ So moments later, people opened the Wayback Machine versions of their own customers’ sites and clicked “save as” on whatever images they could still find. Which was of course an absolute disaster. \ In the meantime, phones kept ringing with customers getting increasingly angry. \ \ (Nice detail: the planned marketing campaign for the raised pricing scheme for their products went out as scheduled that same week.) It’s only a French company that can raise prices in the same week they screwed all of their customers. \ \ The rest of the story I’ll leave out to protect the innocent, but let’s say it’s not going well. (They still have wonderful lunches, I hear.)
https://highlighter.com/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzppn35mj33rmnua6xencd695m7jn8s4pckukpy8urhllaqnugr9x3qythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2ap0qq34xar0wfuj6ctzda6hgttp94r8yetwvd5z6cm0d4cxzmne94m85ut289mqqnq4qq