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looperhacksyesterday at 7:00 PM1 replyview on HN

> This experience fits a pattern I keep running into with European business-facing APIs and services. Something is always a little bit broken. Documentation is incomplete, or packaged as a nasty PDF, edge cases are unhandled, error messages are misleading, and when you report issues, the support team doesn't have the technical depth to understand what you're telling them.

I can definitely confirm that this is a common thing. But I think this is a "small org"-problem more than a "European business"-problem. Apparently, the company has somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees (I couldn't find good data, sadly). With a size like this, the "support" is probably outsourced (meaning they don't know anything), there are maybe 100 engineers (probably less) and the mailing is either done via a third-party or set up by an Admin that left three years ago.

Without any basis, I will speculate that you will notice this more in Europe because there is simply no company at the size of Stripe or similar.


Replies

bojanyesterday at 7:03 PM

While there is some truth in while you saying, I have to say that from my European perspective all the big American companies feel enormously bloated. For example, I've recently learned thats Atlassian has 13000 employees, and I have to ask myself, what do all those people do?

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