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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Google Fi (originally Project Fi) was amazing when it first came out, but at some point they switched to contracted support with no ability to resolve issues (it's not even the support people's fault, as they literally don't have the power to do anything). For awhile Google people used to hang out in the Google Fi subreddit but they seem to have mostly moved on to other projects or companies. Besides locking phones like this example, their insurance has turned into a flat out scam- they either lose the phone completely, claim that the ID doesn't match the one in their system, or tell people there are no replacements available so they have to pay a fee for an "upgrade".

Between this and the GCP price increases today is a pretty solid reminder that relying on any Google service is likely a mistake.

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Google is turning into a complete sh*tshow across seemingly all product lines. Aside from Ads (I mean Search) I can't think of anything that hasn't fallen into disrepair or been EOL'd.

Ads are just as bad, and Search is little more than Ads these days.

They've outsourced Google Ads "account strategists" to contractors abroad who hound Google's advertisers by any and all contact methods they can find -- not those you've given Google -- to force you onto "account review" phone calls in which they talk you through ways to spend more on Google Ads. Then those ads get reviewed by people that don't have the time or knowledge to apply Google's ad policies properly, so they're constantly deactivating years-old ads for vague and very wrong reasons, until you resubmit the same ad and it's approved again, at least until the next random review.

Google has no core competency any more.

Our CTO had to get involved when some GCP SDR wouldn't stop hounding several ICs in our engineering org. We're an exclusively AWS shop and they didn't seem to be targeting decision makers. Multiple please-do-not-contact emails was not enough for them to stop.

It was weird because you'd think they'd at least target decision makers based on LinkedIn titles.

Sounds a bit like my Google Fiber experience (support not being able to do anything). I had a weird problem where my Google Fiber "account" wasn't linked to my real Google account and Google closed that other account (I'm not even sure why) so I literally couldn't pay them, and it took them a long while to figure it out. I essentially had to sign up from scratch and pretend the hardware was transferred to me... from me. Thankfully only a few hours of downtime there.

At least I had my outstanding bill as a small motivator. Google really freaking sucks at customer service.

They are actually thinking of their paid customers as their users, and they make their paid users hate them. Despite their monopoly power, there might be opportunities to build on this genuinely increasing hatred by their users, like Protonmail and Fastmail

Google lost it's way as a company long ago. They used to be the ones defining what it meant to be in a progressive workplace, eschewing the corporate workplace. Now they are that corporate workplace, getting passed up by all the startups. All their products are half-baked, where it's painfully obvious no thought was put in to making a product that was intended to last.

I met some amazing Google engineers - network and SRE peope - early in my career and idolised them for a long time. Recently I got to work with Google on the commercial side and I was shocked by the incompetence, apathy and fear. No idea what’s going on in engineering but rarely have I worked with commercial folks who were so under-qualified and disempowered.

I think when you are no different than the next corporate giant, and you begin to pinch the pennies as a result, then you attract talent that is no different than the rest. I remember at my last job it was always: "Well, our formulas and market research say this position is only worth $X, so that's what we're going to pay." They failed to realize that a large portion of the best qualified people simply would not accept such low compensation. Frankly, I felt a bit insulted coming in, when their pay offer was so low, but my field was so niche in the area that I begrudgingly accepted it.

Support told me this directly once - almost everything is automated and they have no control over it.

My two month old pixel had the microphone die suddenly. After battling for a week, they refused to send me anything but a refurbished phone. Then they didn't scan the return in when received and charged me the full, brand new price for the refurb. Another couple days of useless support tech I got my money back.

Kind of regretting storing all my photos on Google Photos. Downloading takeout data always has missing photos :(

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