Huh, if you click through their link the person responding is also a "sumo administrator" and it's "sumobot" causing the issues. It seems entirely likely they are personally directly responsible for it.

Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offering to waste the complainants time on a call with someone you are asserting is not the right person to be handling this. Supposing you are correct about their position, it makes their response far worse, not better.

CS comms are tricky, I agree! You have to reply to stuff, often before you have any form of full picture. Just think you gotta be careful then, and the message they posted was not good on that front.

I do get what you're saying, and it's not like I think the CSM should be fired for the message. I just think it's bad comms.

Here are some alternative choices:

- post nothing, figure out more internally (community support is also about vouching for people!)

- post something more personal like "Thank you for posting this. I'm looking into who is working on this bot to get this information in front of them". Perhaps not allowed by Mozilla's policies

- Do some DMing (again, more personal, allowing for something direct)

But to your point... it's one person's message, and on both sides these are likely people where English isn't their native language. I'm assuming that community support managers are paid roles at mozilla, but maybe not.

And like... yeah, at one point you go into whatever company chat and you start barking up the chain. That's the work

They are the person who announced the bot would be rolled out. If the person who announced the rollout isn't either the leader of the project or someone who can push for changes to it, then that's already totally against the community.

Second, this "community support forum" isn't just a corporate help desk. It's a forum for community supporters of Mozilla, an open source organisation for which community contributions are hugely important. Mozilla can't just fuck over parts of it's community and expect that to be business as usual.

It is well known passive aggressive corporate phrase to shut people up. Who it is used by is largely irrelevant, it almost always means the same thing.

> Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations.

How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?

I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.

> Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations.

Seems that this is exactly what Mozilla did? And Microsoft, and Reddit, etc.

Hence why I said "from my read". This is how I view the situation, and why the lead is reacting the way they are.

> They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though.

And at what point are all of the translations done by machines and the work the community is doing no longer needed? At the very least, the nature of their work will change and I think they're not interested in participating anymore.

and actually understanding their contributors would require a lot more than a fucking "quick call"

that's the problem. stop thinking about the org and think about the person. these are volunteers who feel taken advantage of, being met with corporate jargon

fly out and take him to dinner if you actually give a shit. or write a check. a "quick call" is so insulting

[dead]

I think you misunderstood what people are taking issue with. You explain that this matter is complicated and non-trivial - and yes, that’s exactly the point!

People don’t have a problem with real-time communication via audio or video in general. They have a problem with the suggestion that it’s a trivial issue that can be easily fixed by "jumping on a quick call."

The point about there being a "fairly in-depth" description of the issues isn’t that there’s nothing more to discuss - fixing those issues would obviously require talking through the specifics. The point is that this is a real problem that requires action and commitment, so suggesting it’s a non-issue that can be clarified with “a quick call” comes off as dismissive and unproductive, whether that’s intentional or not.

Even if not a high level, then s/he had to learn that style of communication from peers in the corp, and the tone is set by managers. It's entirely OK to blame someone who has title “Manager”.

> The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication.

This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.

The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.