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Comment by 8166284 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find it kind of odd that Google, a company famous for having no human support at all anywhere who shuts down any attempts at contacting a human within its ranks for support on ANY of their products or services, always seems to deploy a small army of senior tech people to answer questions every time there is an article posted on HN. Strange double standards afoot, some users matter, others not so much.

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> Does anyone else find it kind of odd that Google, a company famous for having no human support at all anywhere

While a number of people push that false meme repeatedly, everything I've heard from people who've used it (or worked on it, but the latter comes with obvious bias) is that the paid human support on GCP is good.

Heck, on the consumer side, I've gotten good (quality and speed) human support on Google Express, too.

GCP gold support is great as you actually get through to an SRE, silver (what I use)... Not so great, often you'll submit a ticket with a ton of technical detail only to have them come back with something asinine rather than escalating it if it's past their understanding. The difference in price is pretty striking though, so it's no surprise the different in quality of service is different.

Honestly though I can't say I've ever really needed support on GCP, most of the times I've raised tickets its been due to funny behaviour (slow spinning disks in us-central1 was the last one).

https://cloud.google.com/support/

Is where you can talk to a human every time you file a ticket related to Google Cloud Platform.

(disclosure: a human that answers those tickets)

How do you distinguish Google intentionally deploying senior tech people to HN from Google just having a lot of senior tech people who read HN? ;)

Yeah, the latter is literally the case. No one is 'deployed' anywhere, and it's a little amusing to think that we have "no support," but would deploy people to web forums, when looking to promote a commercial business.

(We have support, more than 600 security engineers alone, we just offer commercial support for a commercial product.)

For what it's worth, I'm not "deployed" here. And as I've said on this forum numerous times: we offer real, paid support for Google Cloud.

I, for one, still hold out hope Google will one day pay me to hang out on internet forums all day :)

That's what we pay boulos for. /heh

No, but I do find these regurgitated posts regarding their lack of human interaction annoying. I've always been able to talk to someone at Google on Google Play. Why don't you try it? Go to Google Play and initiate a chat session or ask for someone to call you.

When you pay for Google services you actually get support.

Source: Pay for many Google services, received support when needed.

Users that (potentially) fork over kilowads of cash have a way of attracting special attention.

0.15 kilowad/mo is sufficient: https://cloud.google.com/support/

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