After we write and ship code that prob­a­bly con­tains a bug or two (or three), our job is to then write more code, which will also con­tain bugs. It’s a bad cycle.

This means that some­one has to be in the mid­dle, as the face of Flickr, acknowl­edg­ing these mis­takes and going to great lengths to fix things. This is often a thank­less job, as users just want their prob­lems to go away and devel­op­ers (usu­ally) don’t like to be told they messed up. But they do it for the good, and for the love, of the site. Every bug that gets filed and every sup­port case that gets care­fully answered makes the site that much better.

After being a liai­son between these two worlds long enough, you end up know­ing more than any­one else on the team. When you have mil­lions and mil­lions of users that hit every but­ton and link in com­bi­na­tions you would never dream of, then report­ing the “inter­est­ing” out­comes of their explo­rations, these sup­port agents become walk­ing ency­clo­pe­dias of the ins-and-outs of the site and with Flickr, there are odd edge cases wait­ing on every page. Having peo­ple on your team aware of every­thing the site does is huge. You lit­er­ally can’t buy that or replace it or out­source it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can.