Thread by @gravislizard

a thing i feel like people could do with understanding better is that no company is capable of turning off their software robots

say comcast keeps billing you on the 30th, and one month you need it moved to the 29th for a Reason. if you call and they say they can't do that or you'll just get charged again on the 30th, they're being serious. stopping it requires an act of God.

automated systems are *never* built with cut-outs. this has been my experience everywhere. if the company generally intended the system to apply to all accounts, they probably didn't add a feature for "list of accounts this will not apply to"

it's often "minor" things that piss us off the most in this way. for instance, nobody at tmobile has the power to stop me from getting 6 texts spread out over 8 hours every time I pay my bill. there are so, so many reasons for this

reason one: if you - the customer / user - can't log into it, it isn't polished. it's the bare minimum that will get the job done and not a byte more. in other words, these tmo messages are being sent by a perl script

the logistics of this are like this: they grabbed Some Guy at the company and said "we need Na pster Un radio advertised when people pay their bill, they aren't clicking through on our cobrand" and that guy sighed and Got It Done

he turned up a server called BSNUR01 that's in a colo. he has the login. a couple other people could get it, if they had to, but all of these people are forty degrees separated from the support team

the pain and suffering required to make that shitty perl script check *two* lists in a database is really remarkable. i would say it depends on the place but it almost certainly sucks everywhere

because see the dude just wrote a script that checks the billing database for recent payments, confirms account is active, retrieves appropriate numbers, issues an API call to text them. easy peasey

but once you ask for a cutout, he has to either make a local database and crossref with the customer database - absurd - or get a new column in the customer database - actually equally absurd

this is thousands of dollars of work and has to
- be escalated hard from support
- support leads agree it's worth it
- support leads... figure out how to contact a biz analyst
- analyst decides it's worth a story and submits it
- it percolates to the top of the story backlog

oh and i'm sorry i forgot: the support team also has to have a UI for it, because they can't be emailing Dave and asking him to put new numbers in the database

all this just so you won't have to look at an ad. they won't do it partially because *they get paid for the ads*

anyway this is why twitter will ban you again after unbanning you and apologizing and saying you weren't in the wrong. because no humans are involved, and it costs $3500 to add a cutout list, and that has huge ramifications

because obviously they can't just put you on a cutout for the entire automated moderation system, because then you'd have a blank check to break whatever rules you like. no, they'd have to put you on a cutout for a *specific category*

maybe even for a specific length of time, so you can't abuse just within *that* category.

by the way - whether it's robots or humans moderating the posts, it's still robots, because the humans are forced to act like robots. no difference between making a cutout list for a robot to read vs a human to read, it's all the same effort and cost

in a lot of cases like this there are things The System does that are outright boneheaded and undesirable but fixing them has *colossal* repercussions and will take months of dev time to resolve

really what it comes down to is that things get designed to solve a problem *here and now* and the MVP is what gets delivered, because otherwise "we'll get bogged down" and "make it too complex", but, objects are complex, and software dev cheats and cuts corners as a rule

Basically nothing is finished. A robot you can't tell to stop is not a finished robot, but most automated processes do their work completely blindly and are either on or off. Companies do not like admitting this.

So yes, you're going to get the advertisement SMS, you're going to get auto-banned, you're going to get billed on the 30th, and nobody at the company is capable of changing that because most programs are wound up, set down, and run until a catastrophe happens

They do not think this is unreasonable and they will not apologize and they will not do anything about it. No company does. I've never seen it happen.

And wrt the billing thing - there's rarely adjustments either. One-time changes to a recurring process, I don't see them very often.

If automatic billing was implemented like an outlook calendar invite, where saying "do this every week on tuesday" creates virtual appointment entries every tuesday which you can individually move or delete, that'd be one thing. nobody does that.

your auto bill pay date is a column in a database that says "23" and that's the day of the month you're billed on. done. the script takes the current day, does a SQL query for accounts with that column value, and that's who gets billed.

on the rare occasions they add a cutout feature it's something like "this is the date of the very next bill pay" and then once that hits, it clears it and you have to call in again. You can't say "can you move just the *next* payment also?"

the complexities for this aren't there because that is an *enormous* feature, and they probably discussed it during development and decided they would just not do it.

so, not to beat the horse too much, but consider how any human driven billing system you can conceive of doesn't have this problem because humans are natural language interpreters

you could fix the issues I'm describing with billing by allowing agents to write little scripts that get processed on every transaction, so the BILL_DATE field can be a set of logical checks. in other words, a Post-It on someone's file folder "MOVE FEB/MAR BILL TO 22ND"

we're already good at programming each other. that's why this issue exists, because we started building systems too confusing for the majority of people to use to their greatest extent

*if* we had frameworks for business logic that allowed arbitrary scripting that could be taught to anyone, that'd be great, and that is probably not that unreasonable in actual fact

but we didn't, and won't, do that. for a ton of reasons having to do with classism and profit, the majority of automated systems will simply never be finished products

despite knowing the likely underpinnings, I'm still flabbergasted every time this happens