I work scaling support teams on a daily basis and I couldn't agree more with this.
Beyond the product itself, there's also the question about the relationship with your team, which is often very important. In that regard, it's even worse, and many customers will try to be very nice and say that your team was very helpful, omitting some redflags of a bad customer support experience.
I remember a saying from a friend as follows:
"A relationship with customer is like a marriage.
If everything is too perfect, there are no conflicts or issues, and you just love each other....
There is definitely something wrong. "
It's imperative to 'open them up' and find out what's really happening before it's too late.
You have the opportunity during the first two hours of them being submitted, unless there's a response to them, if I remember correctly.
Being exposing is a bit of a benefit for HN, in that it's a very good way to serve as a snapshot of culture at any given time. People can't just whitewash their histories or wrong actions on HN.
From a legal standpoint, I don't think it makes a lot of difference. Especially since unless you are specifically trying to make a throwaway, figuring out who you are is trivial, especially if you use a chunk of your RL name in your username. Or in my case, if your username is commonly identifiable as you and tied to your RL name on other sites.
I don't think anything about Right To Be Forgotten leaves it to the individual's responsibility to mask their identity.
From a legal standpoint, HN doesn't sell products, use user data for profit, or operate in the EU. Both it and YC have made it rather clear they don't want to touch the EU.
Complying with GDPR would basically be an act of goodwill more than anything, and even that's debatable.
Unless they IP ban the whole of the EU, they will still be subject to the GDPR once any EU citizen accesses their site. (Which, agreeing with AmericanChopper, is a purely theoretical thing - until the moment where YC wants to conduct any kind of business in the EU)
If they raise money from any limited partners in the EU it’s pretty easy to make a case they have an EU business. The physical location is irrelevant - that’s the whole point of the GDPR.
I think you mean from an enforceability standpoint. From a legal standpoint, GDPR applies to all EU ‘data subjects’, and HN would be in breach of it if they don’t provide EU ‘data subjects’ with their rights under the GDPR.
Every documentation system I've ever seen at any company -- large or small -- is almost always undermined by the inclination to: 1) not look things up, and 2) ask someone before looking things up.
The information is almost always 3 clicks away, but people just want to ask another person, or behave in a paralyzed manner as if the information couldn't possibly be found.
And if you work in a "lotta meetings" company culture, even moreso.
I always thought this. However, it seems like this would require a lot of direct management. Who was the PM for you - was it you? if not, was she/he local to the devs? What was your timezone?
My struggle with offshoring to India (from PST) is that the nearly opposite timezone affords minimal overlaps, and thus either the offshore personnel or the local person managing would have crappy hours.
I'm not in defense of Zuckerberg, but I have seen and fortunately stopped some young entrepreneurs doing atrociously invasive things in order to better understand and expand their product.
I don't think this is necessarily a case of wickedness, but instead lack of knowledge and immaturity when the event happened.
Going into someone else's email to read what they have to say about you is something that even a three year old knows is wrong.
If you have dealings with people like that and you're helping them don't be surprised when you find out they have used their money to open a child rape hotel somewhere in the developing world.
