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brong · 20 Dec 2016, 01:10 PM

Thanks BritTim for convincing me to engage here again.

Jacinto - I think most of what you've seen in terms of "company change" is our staff being burned out by the negativity that we often encounter here. In particular when it comes to change. Many of the change we've made have been entirely necessitated by the changing landscape that we exist in, and changes in the overall makeup of our userbase. It gets harder and harder when you have more staff working on the same code and more users using each feature to justify doing one cool little hack for a few users - and the cruft of maintaining those cool hacks over time slows down your ability to get anything done.

We've spoken to teams working on free email services that have existed for a long time, and they say that they can't do anything any more, just tweak the ads pretty much, because everyone is so used to the existing interface and unwilling to change.

We've also had to remove features that had security holes big enough to drive a truck through (like user-configurable Javascript running from our domain!)

And it doesn't take many insults to convince our staff that it's not worth their time coming back here. It's a difficult call at the best of times, whether to spend your work time engaging with a handful of users or that same time working on something that will improve the service for everybody - we all have a massive backlog of things we'd like to do (I went through just the bugtracker tasks assigned to me last week, in a marathon 3 hours of meetings with a couple of people - we managed to close about 1/4 of them, but there's lots of aspirational stuff like a really good IMAP/IMAP sync tool to allow people to keep external IMAP services in sync with their fastmail account, that will take a lot of work. Or simplifying the management of our backend servers to the point that they don't need any human intervention to scale out significantly, and recover with zero downtime from a hardware failure rather than the current 10-20 minute outage to a few percent of users when we have a hardware failure)

So I'll come here, then get frustrated at the signal to noise ratio and leave again. It's the same for all of us - the return both in terms of personal happiness and business value just isn't there as much as it used to be, sadly.

But I promised BritTim that I would engage, so here I am.

We wrote the values statement over about a week of really working through what we do and why we do it, that's how we think of ourselves, and it's how we live. If you disagree, that's fine. But yeah, we don't accept that we've lost our soul. Sure we're for profit, we take money for the service we offer, and we take it proudly because we offer a great service for our users. All our users, not just the squeakiest wheels.

20 Dec 2016, 01:10 PM	#11
brong The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 2,696 Representative of: Fastmail.fm	Thanks BritTim for convincing me to engage here again. Jacinto - I think most of what you've seen in terms of "company change" is our staff being burned out by the negativity that we often encounter here. In particular when it comes to change. Many of the change we've made have been entirely necessitated by the changing landscape that we exist in, and changes in the overall makeup of our userbase. It gets harder and harder when you have more staff working on the same code and more users using each feature to justify doing one cool little hack for a few users - and the cruft of maintaining those cool hacks over time slows down your ability to get anything done. We've spoken to teams working on free email services that have existed for a long time, and they say that they can't do anything any more, just tweak the ads pretty much, because everyone is so used to the existing interface and unwilling to change. We've also had to remove features that had security holes big enough to drive a truck through (like user-configurable Javascript running from our domain!) And it doesn't take many insults to convince our staff that it's not worth their time coming back here. It's a difficult call at the best of times, whether to spend your work time engaging with a handful of users or that same time working on something that will improve the service for everybody - we all have a massive backlog of things we'd like to do (I went through just the bugtracker tasks assigned to me last week, in a marathon 3 hours of meetings with a couple of people - we managed to close about 1/4 of them, but there's lots of aspirational stuff like a really good IMAP/IMAP sync tool to allow people to keep external IMAP services in sync with their fastmail account, that will take a lot of work. Or simplifying the management of our backend servers to the point that they don't need any human intervention to scale out significantly, and recover with zero downtime from a hardware failure rather than the current 10-20 minute outage to a few percent of users when we have a hardware failure) So I'll come here, then get frustrated at the signal to noise ratio and leave again. It's the same for all of us - the return both in terms of personal happiness and business value just isn't there as much as it used to be, sadly. But I promised BritTim that I would engage, so here I am. We wrote the values statement over about a week of really working through what we do and why we do it, that's how we think of ourselves, and it's how we live. If you disagree, that's fine. But yeah, we don't accept that we've lost our soul. Sure we're for profit, we take money for the service we offer, and we take it proudly because we offer a great service for our users. All our users, not just the squeakiest wheels.