User Support

On my last post, Jaime asked:

How the whole “Hacker News MongoDB random bashing” situation was dealt with from inside? There is a lot of MongoDB-hate out there, and I guess that it has to be difficult from an emotional point of view (especially when so many silly comments are made)

What I found the most difficult was when someone posted that they hated something that I, personally, was responsible for. They’d say something like, “the PHP driver sucks” on Twitter. Then I’d quietly go batshit, take a couple deep breaths, and reply with something, like, “Hey, I wrote the PHP driver, what’s up?” Once I had helped them debug the problem, they would often totally change their tune and proclaim MongoDB to be the best, which was very rewarding. However, it was really draining to have people casually hating my work, as though it was make by some uncaring drone at a big company.

More generally, if a user was bashing MongoDB, we would try to reach out and offer help. There was sort of triage process: someone would notice a blog post or tweet and put it up on the group chat. We would provide practically unlimited free support to anyone: their success was our success, after all. Sometimes we couldn’t help or they didn’t want help, but often we could turn bashers in boosters. And that was very rewarding.