@egnatz1 wrote:
I remember the site going down but cannot remember so many design errors and things that just don't work I hear they farmed all their web site work overseas and I'm beginning to believe it. They tout themselves at a technology company but I can't imagine any of the large tech companies having all these and not fixing them or taking weeks to fix them.
The very shaky English seen in some areas does suggest that coding is being farmed out overseas, followed by no obvious code review or QA testing before release, which leads to such howlers as this recently reported prize of an invoice error message: "There is some technical error, please try after sometime."
Ref: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Ebay-error-when-sending-invoices-quot-There-is-some-technical/...
On a more general level, it seems like they're making a common software company error of plowing all their energy into new development and whatever shiny new thing comes along, while simultaneously neglecting support of the stuff that's out there in use now.
It's a variation of the habit of never putting enough money into Customer Support because there's no clear benefit to doing so, in terms of money or return on investment, and so customers face endless hours of listening to music on hold, interspersed with recordings about how important their call is.
In the case of software, a company that's not putting significant effort into bug fixes of the existing software may find itself with a lack of customers for the new stuff. There are at least two reasons for that outcome: the existing product develops a reputation for being unreliable, along with long waits to see if the problem will ever get fixed; and the new code comes out from the same company known for poor maintenance in the past, meaning that it's already got a cloud over it before anyone decides to try it.
Support of the existing product may seem like a zero return on investment, having to pay competent software engineers to maintain a product that's already out there, but failing to do so doesn't enable problems to go away by themselves. It simply magnifies the damage when they occur, because there isn't a team with day-to-day knowledge of current issues or fixes gleaned from experience. Everyone who's off working on the next shiny new thing has to get hauled in at a moment's notice to try to figure out what's gone wrong with the current thing, and thus a problem that might get addressed in hours by people who work with it every day must instead be resolved in days or weeks by people who must start much further down on the learning curve.
But the bigger issue is that once the issues are reported, they continue to go unresolved. It's rare that we get anything concrete in the way of updates on any given thing, either.
