>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology
It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
These sorts of gauntlets are much more life or death than a CSE program, where you are guaranteed at least a decent paying job if you make ok grades. On the other hand, pressure of not even knowing how many years before you can pay down your 300k+ professional school debt and start your life hanging over your head humbles you fast, compared to someone who turns in their capstone project and walks into 200k/yr.
My back of napkin math from another comment:
I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.
One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.
So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.
Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.
So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
Meaning that if someone uses 4 Google products they are contacting Google support on average once a quarter? That seems really high. I would have guessed at most a tenth of that.
But this is a fair point, all the assumptions I make (eg. how many products a user uses, number of requests for support, etc.) are hypothetical and might be incorrect if this was actually implemented. Based on my judgement though, while variable might change, the end numbers will probably remain the same.
However, more importantly: going in with a "we need to support this" mindset alters incentives. Suddenly, useless error messages and lacking documentation aren't okay any more.
A different approach to solve the issue, if it even exists at that scale: make them pay for it. If you want service, pay $10. That's more than enough cover Google's cost and it's cheap for anyone that really requires service because e.g. their account has been locked, or Google's systems have disabled ads on their site. At the same time, it's expensive enough that you don't get flooded with "why do you show me those videos on the front page?" requests.
For power users, I completely agree it might be the only feasible idea.
The closest parallel I can think of Amazon where there is cost of products involved (and >> $10 year I suspect) - they do a good job but even they work hard to make sure you cant easily reach a person.
These apologies to mega corporate is very sad. I am disappointed in you.
A lot of the problem is that when Google screws up, there's no recourse. We don't hear much about when Google gets it right because those people's problems were solved. Surely some significant portion of the incidents you mentioned above fall into that category.
One would hope transparent, clear rules and enforcement would prevail. But ambiguity and silence are far less expensive.
I think the old internet was a lot better because the ratio of moderators to users was much, much higher and the moderators tended to be well informed enthusiasts that were usually running the site and had the ability / authority to fix anything / everything.
The easy solution to me is just add money. Let me pay on-demand for support. I've had a GSuite account for ages and never needed help with anything, but if my account got locked and I needed to talk to a human with the ability / authority to unlock it I wouldn't hesitate to pay $50-$100.
IMO part of the problem at Google is likely years and years of bragging instead of building and the tooling is probably absolute garbage to the point that a human wouldn't make a difference. That's why I say 3 mins seems low. I bet there are a lot of things that a human couldn't fix even if they wanted to.
It's pure speculation, but makes sense to me.
What happened to the math here? I'm not following this step?
Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus.
It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.
How hard it is to gate algorithmic decision making by (sum_of_ad_money_from_customer(x) > SOME_AMOUNT) goto human_review;