Hi since i know you will never respond to this or hear this.
We spent almost 2 months fighting with you guys about basic questions any B2B SaaS should be able to answer us. Things such as invoicing, contracts, and security policies. This was for a low 6 figure MRR deal.
When your sales rep responds "I don't know" or "I will need to get back to you" for weeks about basic questions it left us with a massive disappointment. Please do better, however we have moved to Copilot.
Without it i would have never been able to succeed in life. For me it was the single greatest decision i have ever made in my life. I simply could not focus on anything important, I was a miserable mess.
I was a consistent grade D student in high school, I was that werido in class who everyone hated. In my final year my parents realizing I was not going to have a great future, decided to bring me to our doctor, I was prescribed Dexedrine for ADHD.
That Pill completely and utterly changed me in my final year, i could think clearly. I understood what was being said, it completely changed me. I suddenly decided to go to University for CS, forcing me to do a victory lap in high school. I was able to get into University on an amazing scholarship.
However the biggest thing was the few people who i was vaguely friends with me praised my 180 personality change, they liked being my friend.
I am now 36 years old taking the same dose of meds i have been for the last 20 years. It works for me, immensely. At the same time there is a huge stigma around ADHD medication. My ex hated the idea of me taking meds saying its big pharma pushing this, i don't need this, i just need exercise, etc. She changed her tune after she saw me not on my medication.
I know there are probably people out there that don't need this or abuse it. Sure, but that is true for almost everything.
It is already difficult enough to come up with naming things that makes sense. I kind of get "master" when used in the context, however things like "owner" i struggle extremely hard with. Especially since major companies like Microsoft use it.
I remember asking what did they suggest instead of owner, and they basically gave a list of synonyms that frankly did not really work the same way, or are insanely long e.g. "Primary Account Holder".
Honestly the person running the seminars was very very strict. Several people said "I don't really care what people call me by", or can I just leave it blank to be what people want. The person explained how that attitude is disrespectful to people who do care about these things, and how it can foster an environment of hostility towards people who put them. Which in turn marginalizes those people etc.
However in January the entire sales team removed them after apparently a customer reacted negatively to the inclusion. Which lead to other external facing teams removing it to prevent the same issue. Most people have removed it from emails, and honestly many people just don't seem to care, and HR doesn't seem to be enforcing it.
The company I work for did something similar at the end of last year. We had consultants who went over everything, and made a massive document of all sorts of things they deemed "problematic". Along with a week long of seminars/training/workshops on sensitivity/inclusion/etc.
- Everyone had to list what pronouns they wanted people to use. In slack / our email footers everything. This was not optional. We were also told that referring to people by their names instead of pronouns can be offensive.
- Words such as "master", "owner", among some other ones were deemed problematic and needed to be changed. Ironically they also said use of "CRUD" was inappropriate because it was slang for poop.
- We have a bunch of things where we have an owner of users/reports/etc, and we have a bunch of code with stuff like "listUsersOwnedByUser", which apparently could be construed as offensive by certain groups of people.
- A bunch of verbs such as "see", or "visible" could be ablest, etc.
- Our company had a completely optional get out/get exercising type of thing since everyone is WFH, and apparently exercise could be considered offensive to people.
- Our company of 300 people does not have some sort of LGBTQIA+ outreach program.
Some of it made sense, but a lot of it was frankly so nitpicky and difficult to even understand. Pretty much everything we were told/taught went out the window almost immediately.
I hate this. We moved from Okta a few years ago after we were basically received almost no actual real support for a bunch of issues, even though we were paying a premium cost. Nobody cares about issues on their Github, the kicker was a when we received a support response as suddenly something was no longer working after an update, we got help in the form of "We have no plans to address this anytime soon." when asking for an ETA.
We ended up switching to Auth0, after we had a few calls with them. We shaved a decent amount off our costs with Auth0's Enterprise plan, and their webtask based rules worked. While the migration sucked for a bit, in the end we were much happier.
Why isn't Auth0 on that list? For most enterprise customers SAML is required for SSO. However SAML is locked behind their enterprise plan (and enterprise is stupidly expensive).
On top of that now enterprise plans now require you to pay by connection as well. So if you want to allow multiple customers SSO connections the cost starts increasing drastically.
I guess my issue is that we didn't want or need support. We just wanted x-pack features such as Auth and the Alerting plugins.
We were already hosting it fine ourselves on AWS, as we had devops people very familiar with ES. However the price they quoted us per year was insane for our cluster size for ~20 nodes.
The last time i talked to Elasticsearch about pricing, it was so extremely expensive for our use case to the point of it basically being a non valid option for us.
We write tests to verify if things are working correctly using Cypress + Mocha. We have simple unit tests for validating basic functionality and extensive integration tests. We typically have a set of tests per feature.
The problem i have noticed is that people say "well it works in isolation", but on integration with other components it doesn't work properly. Unfortunately this is a huge problem i find, and frankly the idea of numerous shared hooks and ensuring they are side affect free is very painful.
Honestly i struggle when people argue that 'this' and class components are complicated, and that hooks remove that complexity. Yet then i see people composing together dozens of various hooks and HoC's to achieve the same balance is beyond confusing.
Recently i was assigned a PR for a component (a login form) i wrote about a two years ago which was a whole 300 lines. The person who wrote the PR also took the time to make it "functional", which has now resulted in it being split into almost a dozen different files. I don't find this cleaner or easier to understand at all.
Current team i am on uses MobX, and Typescript for our app and frankly it is painfully simple, and yet people keep arguing that we should drop mobx, and switch to hooks and i don't see any benefit.
The company isn't in a third world country they are basically reliant on an extremely specialized piece of software/hardware that doesn't work on anything more modern.
Unfortunately this is basically what i am dealt with and i don't have any real options of changing the environment.
Idea 1: Is out because they are not actually connected to the outside internet from their workstations.
Idea 2: Not viable due to the sheer number of users most likely.
Idea 3: We tried to get virtualbox to run on their machines, which we found most only have a ~4 GB of ram and it makes hosting an entire other OS a very painful experience.
That is something a coworker is looking into, the biggest problem is we are expected to have ~5,000+ users of our app internally providing them all with VM's is way beyond the scope of what we support.
Even getting our app running on premise was a nightmare, and resulted in us just buying a rack mount and having them put it inside their DC, after everything they gave us was pretty awful.
Honestly we told them our requirements well over a year ago. Which wasn't an issue apparently, even when we did a pilot in their internal labs which they were running Ubuntu.
It only came up after we started the rollout, when someone from their side who was asked to write documentation about how our app would work into their workflow, realized our app didn't work at all on his station. Which lead to oh no their requirements are horribly wrong.
To me it was a communication breakdown on both sides, but i doubt i can get them to change.
I am going to give getting electron built in Virtual Box and see if i have any luck with it.
We spent almost 2 months fighting with you guys about basic questions any B2B SaaS should be able to answer us. Things such as invoicing, contracts, and security policies. This was for a low 6 figure MRR deal.
When your sales rep responds "I don't know" or "I will need to get back to you" for weeks about basic questions it left us with a massive disappointment. Please do better, however we have moved to Copilot.