GitHub Support here. This does not live up to the level of service we strive to offer our customers. We would love to follow up directly to learn more about this incident as it appears we have opportunities to learn and improve from this experience. I understand the irony of asking to open another Support ticket, however, @zamalek please do open another Support ticket with subject “Hacker News follow up” and a Support Manager will reach out.
What a boilerplate PR response. Today it's Github, but tomorrow it'll be the same story, different managed service. OP's problem isn't even specific to Github, the entire "aaS" industry seems rife with over-promise, under-deliver.
Yeah, you want to "take this offline" and handle OP's case individually, and perhaps OP gets their demands met, some sort of service credit, or something.
But what the rest of us want is real systemic change, to where managed services like this actually give us real value, and not "marginal value, but nothing works like it ought to and you're going to spend a lot of time working around the bugs and gluing the parts together", where every bug report (which has to be filed as a support ticket) is met with "you're holding it wrong", or where the service goes down and the status page gaslights us, or …
Buying managed services instead of letting engineers do their jobs is today's "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
I'm not defending github specifically, I have no experience with the customer service and have no reason to beleive they are or aren't garbage. I'll assume they are garbage.
To be fair, what do you expect the first representative to do/say? They responded in 3 hours, and it's unlikely they can do much beyond escalate this issue internally. We can't expect them to say "We're going to do sweeping changes" at this point.
Github in the past has done sweeping changes for things such as youtube-dl. They created a large blog post about it, including having both programmers and laywers review every DMCA request, and allowing the most minimal amount of changes to comply, etc. That type of response takes time and coordination.
Even cloudflare with their CEO/CTO can't offer sweeping changes in a HN comment. There's layers to this. You can only really expect damage control from a HN comment.
They could have posted from a non-throwaway (or at least non-anonymous) account and identified a clear point of contact. As it is with such vague instructions, it would be far too easy for the issue to get lost in the Rube Goldberg machine of their support infrastructure again.
Disclosure: I have no specific experience with GitHub support, but I have experience with other support organizations and "send us a new ticket" can easily result in a repeat of the original bad experience. I'm not saying this would necessarily happen to the OP, but we also don't have any assurance at this point that it wouldn't happen.
> OP's problem isn't even specific to Github, the entire "aaS" industry seems rife with over-promise, under-deliver.
I agree with this perspective significantly more than I don't. My (again, smaller) disagreement lies with cost: the entire "aaS" industry generally is in the ballpark of $15-$30/user/year [edit: /user/month]; you are getting what you pay for. $250/user/year is in a completely different class.
At $30/user/mo, you're getting into a fair portion of a dev's salary, and "Run Gitlab" is competitive. But then instead of a support person who is going to give me the runaround, I have an actual engineer who has the power to actually fix things.
But it's also not "$30/user/mo", either. It's that, plus (my salary * time spent on support tickets and outages), plus storage costs, plus compute costs.
> the entire "aaS" industry generally is in the ballpark of $15-$30/user/year
That's $1-3/user/mo. That's very low for SaaS. You may get that for indie products or bulk pricing (for thousands to millions of users, e.g. end-users).
OK, so just a note that GitHub Enterprise is $21/user/mo. It's a lot more than their base paid plan (which is very cheap at $4/user/mo) but just slightly above average for an offering of so many features.
For a company as large as github (and microsoft), I would expect support metrics (mean time to response, max time to response) to be known to management.
We have plenty of tickets like this too - in the Enterprise Premium tier. One about SLA, about 10 for Actions misbehaving... you should really just have look at your own metrics and not give someone complaining to the internet white glove treatment. For the amount of money you take for Enterprise Premium you really ought to offer it to everyone without complaining.
It's possible that there is a bottle neck in the system that is invisible, possibly intentionally by someone in the middle, to people higher up in the chain. This is a way for them to break that blockage, and put some spot light on it.
What this does now is create a specific marker 'Hacker News follow up' that cannot be swept under the rug. There will be eyes on this particular issue, both inside and outside the company.
