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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

This brings up an unsatisfying conversation I had with an ex google person. I've worked in the embedded/industrial side of tech for most of my career. And the ratio of customer support vs the amount of money google is charging is utterly shit from my perspective. My friend tried to explain why it needs to be shit for vague security reasons but I'm unconvinced. Company collects thousands of dollars from customers and can't be bothered to give them a phone call when something goes sideways? Give me a break.

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You get better support if your $15 hamburger meal is missing cheese. It's weird that companies that operate at scale get a free pass to ignore smaller customers just because they have bigger ones.

You get better support if your $15 hamburger meal is missing cheese.

That's a great way of putting it and 100% accurate. Fast food joints set a minimal customer service level magnitudes better than Google.

They don’t really get a free pass though, maybe in their monopoly market of advertisement, but their poor support is one of the primary reasons google cloud isn’t earning any of the European public cloud money while Azure and AWS are having a party.

Google has a lot of really good tools, that they could sell to enterprise. You could argue that they have the only viable Office365 alternative for non-tech enterprise. But they just don’t seem to know how to sell it because their advertising monopoly infects everything they do.

The single place they’ve been successful is in education, and even there they are struggling to keep supplying what schools actually want + privacy. So I fully expect to see them driven out of this space in the coming decade.

The reason lack of support works at scale is that they are successful with resources channeled places other than direct support so their strategy doesn't need it.

It is sort of a "cars don't handle rugged terrain as well as horses" thing, it isn't crippling when the use case is paved roads. It may suck for your use case but it makes sense.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that Google employees don't give out reasons for their decisions because they can't! They trust too much in their machine learning and there's no way for employees to know why this event triggered over that one.

Or (more likely) because they are not allowed to by policy.

Or because the machine won't tell them why because privacy. (Although this applies less in the ad side of the business than consumer facing bits)

If your ml model is a magic black box and there's zero visibility into the system, even internally, as to the signals that resulted in a decision, you've hired a monkey that can run a tensorflow tutorial, not actually someone that understands machine learning.

Google support is non-existent. One of the reasons, why I stay away from Google Cloud.

Not true... you just have to pay for it. I worked for A fortune 100 company that was moving some things to Google App Engine, and paid for the highest level of support. We had a list of guys we could get on the phone whenever we needed, including the main guy in charge of everything.

I helped them fix a lot of bugs and broken processes, but I'm better than most at making reports. If they had to deal with bad developers blaming Google for problems that had nothing to do with Google, that would waste a lot of time. But on the other hand, if we didn't pay for support, those problems probably never would have been fixed, and I don't think we were ever compensated or given discount support for helping.

I don't see "Fortune 100-level support" listed on Google's website. How do I purchase it?

Presumably, by spending enough money to get an account manager, then asking them to sell you a support contract.

Account manager and support contract are sold together... $150,000/yr paid up front + 4% of yearly spend.

Seems insanely high, especially compared to the next step down which is only $250/mo per user... you could get by with a separate account with a single master user that controlled all the deployments and billing and only pay $3,000/yr. What you get for that extra $147,000+/year is that you talk directly with the lowest level engineer actually working on the problem rather than relaying messages that lose context... but you'll still need to know what you're talking about and be able to actually help the engineer rather than spin them in circles, or you'll be kept at bay.

https://cloud.google.com/support says the highest plan promises 15-min response and a dedicated account manager.

For consumers, https://one.google.com/about/support is the way to pay for the support, since they claim "Cross-Google" support. I haven't used Google One support (even though I am a member as I have a subscription to their storage plan), so I don't know how good it is though, and it's not super clear how "cross" it really is. https://one.google.com/support says 2-3 min response for phone/chat though.

Last time I filed one of those P1 tickets, it was assigned to someone immediately but we didn't get any useful help from the support people for 7 hours.

It took multiple escalations to people responsible for the specific service and the issue was entirely Google's service having an error. Meanwhile production was hard-down that whole time.

What happens to my Google One plan if my account is banned for a TOS violation?

I don't know - I'm just a Google user, and I haven't gotten my account banned. I presume it won't work ?

So the reason I would want guaranteed human support from Google is in the event they mistakenly ban my account of 13 years. If it also bans me from the support product then it’s completely pointless.

> Google support is non-existent.

> Not true... you just have to pay for it. I worked for A fortune 100 company

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that there only about 100 companies who can afford Fortune 100-ish level support..............................................

We pay for the highest level of support on Google Cloud and it isn't worth shit. I'd say it actually provides negative usefulness, as usually their support folks just waste our time and not do anything.

The only place I've gotten actual support from Google was with Ads and my company at the time was spending 9 figures.

To the rude as hell tone of the reply beneath this: The GKE control plane failed. There's no quality improvement that I could have made on a bug report about their shit being broken.

I think many here are missing the real problem: Why should customers have to pay for support to fix problems on Google’s end?

The other reason of course being that any given Google product may not even exist a couple of years from now

I don't know about Google Cloud as a whole but I've contacted Firebase support a number of times and they have always answered promptly.

This may be the difference between an acquisition vs a homegrown product at Google

I'm a paying customer of firebase & google maps and both helped me promptly on technical issues.

yeah, in my exp in industrial you can get a applications engineer on thr phone and even an office visit if you pay enough

Sounds kind of like monopolistic behavior or something

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