Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

The Rackers that I have contact with are generally terrible. Once in a while I get someone who really knows their stuff, but most of the time it takes me 3-4 'tries' to get an answer to my questions.

>> Culture, not just code

Rackspace appears to employ a lot of non-technical people that have been placed in technical roles. They don't understand the why's. Maybe their goals are to be able to train anyone and they don't want people being creative etc. I know a handful of people that work there that I would have never suspected they would work at Rackspace doing web or server support.

>> Flexible for multiple roles

This bugs me. Mediocre employees shuffling around from position to position. I would suspect the amount of people that can perform 'very good' at a number of jobs inside Rackspace is pretty low. Or any other company, for that matter.

>> Trained

Most of the Rackers at the first and second support tiers are not much more than script-readers it seems.

Ex-Racker here. There are different levels of support available. AFAIK, there exists a level of support where you talk to devops engineers directly, but I believe its kinda pricy.

In general, I think you get what you paid for: most customers don't want to pay a lot for support.

Its true that Rackspace does employ a lot of non-technical people and train them. I actually really like how they do this: I've worked with many people who moved from support to developers, and they are not only top-notch, but understand the pain points of customer-service and help make the offerings very user and support friendly.

Rackspace costs roughly 10x of many of their competitors. I thought that extra cost was for support?

I see you have never used Rackspace, ha ha ha.

When you call Rackspace, you will probably get an entry-level person. That makes sense, since answering calls all day is an entry-level task. If necessary, the call will be escalated as high as it needs to go, to meet the need.

When you call AWS, Digital Ocean, or Linode... just kidding, you can't call them, at least not without paying at least as much as Rackspace.

My experience has been the exact opposite. We host many of our clients' systems on Rackspace, and Rackspace support is not only on top of things (we usually get a response to support tickets in ~30 minutes), but they're also extremely proactive and let us know of potential problems before they occur. I personally have never spoken to a technical person there who didn't know their stuff inside out (speaking as a technical person myself).

Your comment reeks of hubris.

>wreaks

The word you wanted there is "reeks."

They have good systems, less-awesome people, at least some of the time.

They suffered the same issues a lot of companies that grew quickly had: their sales outstripped their ability to hire and retain the same level of talent that made them great to begin with.

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