"We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks,...."

Someone could have documented this and/or simply answered a damn question instead of wasting weeks of opportunity cost. Too many dicks and idiots on that website, it seems.

"who honestly cares if it gets fixed" - everyone that comes after this and has to deal with it and waste weeks of their life trying to pry some required nugget of info from a passive aggressive group of maintainers of stuff which actively ignores industry standards?

Put yourself in the shoes of the team who was asked to fix this. They probably have a dozen feature requests, two dozen support tickets, and now this guy wants this bug fixed because it does t follow a standard and he had a hard time understanding it. Yes, that is a real issue, and in the ideal world it would be fixed along with every other issue on the list, but in the real world it is unlikely to ever be important enough to deprioritize the other important issues I imagine this team faces. At the end of the day, some bugs are just better to live with.

again, part of the problem was lack of communication and documentation. waiting 2 weeks to be told "fuck off" (in essence) is shitty all around.. it's not JUST that a (stupid) bug exists, it's how it was handled in this case, and, apparently, how they choose to handle it going forward, affecting who knows how many more people/teams in the next few years, and how many more weeks of wasted time. And if this team handles this sort of thing this way, how much more time is being wasted and projects delayed? This is at least as much a communication problem as it is a technical one.

And yeah, I can put myself in those shoes, as I've been on both sides of this. Treating newcomers in your communication channel (slack, etc) with the same level of urgency YOU would want (or need) when you ask for help from some other team is a bare minimum.

I agree that the devs were needlessly uncommunicative, but I disagree that the right decision is necessarily to fix the bug. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to leave the bug as it is, even if it miffs some devs on hacker news.

This is a total failure to follow any sort of standard.

A 504 is a gateway timeout due to the server failing to complete the action, hell, a 400-level for "you fucked up" would be preferable.

4xx would be what you want anyway, no?

What you described:

  let x = 2 // runs
  x = 3;    // runs
  x = 3;    // runtime error, you made a mistake

No, I'd want a balance update to succeed. Even if it's to the same value that it already had.

Or at least return a "no change" message, and not a failure result in the 400s or 500s.

I don't think it's clear from the OC that even if they weren't using the wrong HTTP response they would want an update to succeed if it is the same value, at which point 409 could be a reasonable response code.

2XX level is for the action succeeding. 4XX level is for the action failing due to the user. 5XX level is for the action failing due to the service/code/infra.

In the real world, updating your balance to the same number should be a 200, however in some weird financial world, it may be a 400 because you may not be allowed to set the same balance due to some financial rule. A 500 is a terrible choice unless setting the balance caused an error at your code/infrastructure level.

304 would be fitting.

Nobody competent wants to spend extra time and work dealing with junior level mistakes. If the basic stuff can't be done right, then the complex stuff definitely isn't done right. Little issues like this cause ripple effects and now guaranteed you've got incorrect behavior in other parts of the system because of this broken API. It's a time suck all around.

The person who brought up the story mentioned account balances. Someone will definitely care when a latent combination of bugs is triggered and the company loses money because of it. See Knight capital and the more recent Citi debacles.