Hacker News Reader

Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting article from a company that has almost nil customer support.

From the movie The Negotiator:

A Marine and a sailor are taking a piss. The Marine goes to leave without washing up. The sailor says, 'In the Navy they teach us to wash our hands.' The Marine turns to him and says 'in the Marines they teach us not to piss on our hands'.

BTW it's not true that Google has almost nil customer support. There's extensive support for paying customers (for ads, GCP, GSuite etc.).

But it's amazing to me how reliable things like Gmail are, and how in so many years I've never felt the need to seek support.

The joke in that scene always baffled me, because the Marines are born of the Navy and still carry a lot of the Navy's epistemology-why would they be taught something so fundamental so differently?

(Yes it's a joke but sometimes I overthink things, heh)

I've also seen it as Harvard and MIT graduates, then someone comes in, washes his hands first, saying "at Yale, they taught us to wash our hands before touching a holy object."

Quite OT but I almost always wash my hands _before_ (and after) using the restroom. Especially in a public place, it always made sense to me to do it before and after. It seems much more hygienic both for the "holy object" and other people!

I was told that if your work in a chemical plant or a chip fab you learn to wash your hands before you don't want chemicals on sensitive parts

And of course you don't know what germs etc are on the taps :-)

You usually use gloves though

Yes so there is nothing wrong with an extra layer :-) ask any medical practitioner why the put gloves on after they wash their hands.

I thought one of the advantages of the "holey" variety was that you don't have to put your hands on anything to piss... ehh, Eli.

The original joke involved simply the demonym for the servicemember and can be used with any service, and says “they teach sailors/soldiers/airmen to ...” and “well they teach marines/etc ...,” which would probably make you less confused by the joke. I heard that joke growing up involving airmen in both directions of the joke, and it was common until that film.

Relatedly, in case you don’t know this, never think you can call a marine a sailor based on the lineage you’re discussing here. Soldier is also only an appropriate term for someone in the Army, and there are countless films that screw this up. It’s less about the service and more of an identity.

Relatedly, in case you don’t know this, never think you can call a marine a sailor based on the lineage you’re discussing here.

As an Army veteran (who doesn't really like announcing himself as such when doesn't add to the discussion), quite well aware. I do-however make light-hearted jokes about Crayons from time-to-time ;) It's a fun sibling rivalry we have, the Army and the Corps.

> how reliable things like Gmail are

Except when they aren't and even have to get data back from backup tapes.

I have a $700 dollar phone I bought from Google with apps made by Google and Gmail search hasn't worked in weeks.

Don't know if I got feature flagged or what. Unaffected by clearing data, clearing cache, or signing out of my account.

Search just returns nonsensical results.

We buy a support package and receive excellent support for our GCP services.

Although that, technically, refutes an accusation of non-existence of customer support, it begs the question of what it means to be a enough of a "customer" to receive support (and at what level):

Is it enough to use a gratis product? ("Paying" for it with data or ad-eyeballs, I suppose)

Is it enough to pay money for the product?

Must one also pay a subscription fee in addition to paying for the product in the first place? [1]

Is something else, sometimes, necessary (such as volume/clout)?

I think we've seen most of the spectrum of answers from the software industry (especially "enterprise" software), with the main novelty being the existence of web/SaaS gratis products.

[1] Depending on where on the spectrum between hand-holding and mere bug fixes the support ends up falling, this could be characterized as double-dipping

I'm not sure what "almost nil customer support" measures out to, but speaking for myself and not Google Cloud (my employer) I know we have:

- fantastic support internally (probably not what you're caring about),

- support to external globally-scaled customers whose issues don't exist because technical account management helped set up clear goals, such as uptime, described in the blog (probably also not what you're counting)

- support for even the smallest companies willing to pay as little as $100/user/month for Role-Based Support[1] and also receive direct access to support until they decide it's no longer needed (and by design, scale support costs to zero)

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

> This is an interesting article from a company that has almost nil customer support.

This never gets old. It's almost as predictable as some random reference to "don't be evil".

If you don’t think a company has customer support it’s because you aren’t a customer.

IIRC they define their customers as other internal teams, separate from external customers, who (I'm guessing) are handled by external product teams.

That's generally correct. Though a lot of SLOs of SRE teams are influenced by external commitments as well. But I suppose that's pretty obvious considering there's SRE teams supporting cloud products.

I suspect they meant there internal customers :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com