Postmates Blog

His "apology": http://blog.postmates.com/post/61340672198/a-message-to-our-customers-from-our-ceo

Last night I sent a private e-mail to our Customer Service team in response to a customer complaint regarding her past orders and restaurant profile. My e-mail, which outlined how to resolve the customer issue, contained a bad joke which was very poor in taste. Subsequently, the bad joke was sent to the customer. What I said was a major lapse in judgement on my part. I deeply regret this.
I immediately reached out to the customer and offered my full and sincere apology. I would like to extend that same apology to all of our customers and Customer Service team. There is no excuse for this.

At Postmates we love and value our world-class Customer Service. We take great pride in our Customer Service team. However, with my comment I have not lived up to our own standards and also damaged my team’s reputation.

I cannot find the words to describe how much I value our customers and how deeply I care about them being happy. There is no excuse for this type of conduct.

I take full responsibility for my actions. I am sincerely sorry.
Bastian Lehmann

Postmates | Software Engineers (all levels), Engineering
Manager | San Francisco, Bellevue | Full-time | https://postmates.com

My team (Operations Technology) at Postmates is hiring engineers across the stack at all levels, as well as engineering managers. We are full vertical owners of microservices, responsible for creating world-class self-service and support for our customers, including buyers, merchants and couriers.

We are looking for engineers passionate about providing excellence to customers and an interest in growing alongside the company. We are growing fast (https://blog.postmates.com/san-francisco-february-7-2019-postmates-inc-2760fd929bc). As we grow and build new systems, you will not only be able to choose the technologies we use, but help define the strategic direction of these systems.

https://careers.postmates.com/openings for other teams, or email me jarred.hawkins@postmates.com for more information about these roles.

Depends on the mutex implementation. Many mutexes will do their own spinning internally - for short critical sections, you can avoid sleeping and waking your thread, a (relatively) expensive operation. Obviously spinning for an unlimited amount of time is less efficient - in the case of a priority inversion, you'll effectively deadlock. [1]

There's also tools like [2], where you can tell a mutex to spin if the current lock holder is actively running (as opposed to blocked or preempted), to get the best of both worlds.

[1] https://blog.postmates.com/why-spinlocks-are-bad-on-ios-b69fc5221058
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/724384/