Comment by etruong42

I have seen this as well, watching customer support issues get escalated to engineering. Many times, engineering tries to blow off the issue. It was fascinating to me how quickly an issue got escalated to numerous engineering managers, directors, leads, etc when the customer threaten to cancel their contract.

I was even more blown away when the whole thing becomes old, forgotten news the moment the customer stopped threatening to cancel the contract, even if the underlying problem remains.

This really reinforces the lesson that the main power structures of the world does not listen to "reason" - it only responds to incentives, whether they're airlines or ginormous tech companies.

Hacker News has also repeatedly noticed the same thing whenever a big tech customer issue hits the top of Hacker News, and the comments point out that the only way that customer got help was when it got enough attention to cause a reputation risk to the big tech company.