Comment by victorhooi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by victorhooi | Hacker News Reader

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What you said is quite untrue.

I know - because I am one of those humans in support grins. I work in the support organisation for GSuite (formerly Google Apps). And I work across the hall from the guys who support GCP (Google Cloud Platform). And there are an entire army of us, helping support many, many enterprise customers.

Even our consumer products have real people manning support phones - I know, because I've had to call them before (mostly Google Play Music issues - this was before I joined Google, so I couldn't use my internal pull...lol).

Regarding your second point - abuse is a real problem for any cloud provider. I know, because I happen to work in anti-abuse. It's a difficult problem to crack, and there's a lot of smart people (at many companies) trying to solve it. But please understand there are real humans at the other end, trying to provide a good service - and it's not very kind to take cheap shots at them.

There usually are appeal processes available for nearly any kind of action taken - if you were actually personally affected by an issue, or feel unsure about how something was handled - please feel free to reach out to me. I can't guarantee I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but I'm certainly willing to reach out to see what can be done.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but the views expressed here are purely my own.

Apparently time after time stories arise with Googlr lack of support and are very slow at answering ans helping. In this very damn case no freakin' response. Often people have to get a Googler to initiate a Hello wothin the organization. So while we respect you doing your day work, we think your organization as a whole fail at customer support. Yeah I have read sicceyss stories too but many of them seen to be businesses with really good pocket or have deep connection with Google already or just being lucky.

Your competitor AWS would refund in less than an hour with a billing support, without going through any phone calls. Your competitor has a support subscription service at least for people to purchase (expensive but worth it). Yours?

Often, these types of blog posts only present one side of the story - so I would caution a bit of patience, to see the full story. This applies no matter what company is at the other end - whether it's us, Amazon, Facebook etc. In this case, I know there's a few technical details missing - I won't comment further on this specific issue, as far more qualified people than me are already on this issue =).

Many times, I've seen it's due to a misunderstandings, or crossed-wires regarding technical issues.

And yes, our support team does provide refunds in many cases - I know, because these sometimes get escalated to me to approve (e.g. if they're borderline). I think one was actually offered already in this case, but there may have been a misunderstanding or mix-up around that.

And yes, we have a "paid" support service - it's actually comes free with any GSuite subscription (even at the most basic level, which I think is like $5 a month). You can chat, email, or phone. I work as an engineer in the team that supports this.

For GCP (our cloud offerings), the support offering is a paid offering:

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

I hired a freelancer from the Philippines on Upwork to work with me on some Google App Engine issues because Google's documentation is incredibly unhelpful at times and as well as bizarrely organized.

He was from the Philippines, and it turned out he was a contractor providing "support" for Google Cloud. So I guess Google is outsourcing their support? Isn't this something Dell tried to do in the 90's with disastrous results?

(am an eng at google)

How else do you provide 24/7 support?

Regarding your first issue - I'm sorry to hear you had documentation issues.

There should be a huge "Send Feedback" widget at the bottom of every single documentation page:

http://i.imgur.com/MhWbY0W.png

http://i.imgur.com/Gu8GzLB.png (If you click it, it will pop up this modal form, which also allows you to just screenshot the offending part).

Did you try using this link on any of the pages that you found unhelpful, or bizarrely organised?

I'd encourage you to use this - as all of this feedback comes through to us via an internal system, and it does get reviewed (although I'm sure you can imagine the volume).

Otherwise feel free to reach out to me if you have specific concerns and feel more comfortable doing it that way, or you're unsure about the response you received. (Although quite frankly, I think the form is best, as that gets tracked, and anybody can jump on it).

Actually a PM I reached out to a couple of months ago did get back to me. I was disappointed at first because I heard nothing from Google Next could be uploaded online.

But Google did come through and they posted the images here: https://cloud.google.com/storage-options/

That had been my complaint...that the documentation was hard to get and that when I saw the images presented at Next I understood things that I had previously given up on.

"not very kind to take cheap shots at them"

But man this is business, this is the stuff the global economy runs on 24/7, I hope you all are tougher than that...

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