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Comment by luka-birsa | Hacker News Reader

A suggestion for engineers that lack business experience. As soon as your project grows beyond the non-hobby scale and starts making real money, invest some time to reach out to company providing the services that keep it alive and find an account manager that will take care of you.

We're a Google customer and of course we had our fair share of issues (btw: it's the same with Azure, based on our experience), and we always escalate to our account manager. That usually starts turning the wheels much faster.

Also, do not be afraid to ask your account manager for additional discounts. Everybody in sales has some wiggle room to get you a better deal. With Google their account manager actually suggested that we work through a reseller and we're getting % off the list prices.

Dealing with Google, Amazon, etc.. is not like dealing with code. It's not only transactional and you need to invest some time in the relationship even if you're the customer.

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I found the Azure reps to be completely useless for any of the actual problems.

I worked for couple of really big enterprises, one of which had such a high commitment that Azure sent two engineers to sit with the teams working on their cloud. Highest level Enterprise support .. and yet for actual non-obvious problems it took them a month to reply with: can't help you with this, you must be doing it wrong.

This was techsupport tho, I'm sure the billing for multi-million commitments was just fine and dandy including wining and dining.

One other company was a big AWS user (and some Office365 so there were Azure pitches too) and GCP tried to get in with the business as well. When we went to their offices the level of patronizing smug that came from their reps was astonishing, so off-putting that I refused all further interaction with them as I wanted to barf.

just like any other reps from Microsoft services, just completely useless.

I worked for one of Azure's biggest customers and our account management teams were fantastic. A few individuals were some of my favorite people I've worked with. That's where all the talent in the Azure support org goes- promoted to the biggest contracts.

Yes the big fish get attention and the small fish get ignored. Welcome to the B2B universe. If you're a small business relative to the scope of your counterparty, you generally won't get good service or have any leverage.

Seek out resellers or providers who are closer to yourself in size. You want it to hurt a bit if they lose your business. Of course you can go too far the other way as well, if you're a large client of a small company you'll probably get good service but they will be living parasitically off of you which isn't healthy and they may not be able to respond quickly enough if your needs grow.

I see this for actual service providers that have full control over their business, but if you have resellers of similar size as your own org, don't you end up with the problem that they are about as important for the big provider as you are and you are as screwed as before when things go wrong?

You comment reminded me of what my dad said about service contracts from IBM back in the 1970's. They promise they'll get a tech on site in 24 hours. They don't promise he'll know how to do anything.

I have dealt with Google and AWS under 4 different companies that spent between low double digit to high triple digit a month.

General view:

* AWS - Great customer service. Steak house level customer service when moved from cc billing to contract billing.

* GCP - terrible service regardless of spend and regardless of dynamic or contract billing. AM do not know products. AM's are equivalent of BOA branch employees that solve a problem by calling the same number the customer calls and give the phone to the customer who came to see them in their branch, except that the customer service phone is the same opaque process the customer is subjected to. The only GCP product that had good customer service was the original App Engine, supported out of Germany ( I think ). We could get in touch with engineers responsible for it over video chat.

Same experiences here. AWS was awesome. They did crazy things I wouldn’t expect like spend days in person and join us at equinix colo to get the direct connect working. We didn’t even spend that much relatively, under $100k/mo.

At a prior gig we were using their FPGA instances and had a way of causing hard faults on the system that required reboots, with specific FPGA bitstreams. Their systems monitored this and when we reached out about it they scheduled at least 2-3 different calls with the engineers/PIs who were directly responsible so we could coordinate with them and help pin down the issue to get things working. We were literally renting by the hour; I don't even think we had an account manager, with variable costs; maybe a few hundred to 3k a month?

The funniest thing was that we got about a million in CAF bucks from them to go contract and move more stuff from AWS ( our monthly was low triple digits thousands ) and their AMs still messed everything up.

THIS. I love how AWS AM go out of their way to deliver, where as Google's AM simply start to ghost you when the conversation gets to heated or not contributing to their bonus cheques.

As I've said and others have experienced, GCP's AM are killing their business and we've built up everything around AWS. There's no need to even learn Terraform, all of what we do are automated anyhow without it. CDK is enough.

Screw Google, screw Azure.

> ...simply start to ghost you when ...

I read that as "g-host"

Ironically enough, the last time I was "Courted" by google cloud to move some of our infra there (after it went public that we had raised a round), they were up front about how their "account management sucks" and that we'd have a better "customer experience" if we went through a reseller.

That...always sticks out to me, but, when dealing with the Google Education folks, there were some things that even resellers couldn't do, and I had to email people directly (via LinkedIn stalking) only to have my issue disappear a few days later with no reply.

Thing is parent's advice is horrible because the account manager at google simply started to ignore my billing issues. Like I could reach out to no one, the account manager realized I was going to leave and stopped responding.

So the "make sure you invest in an account manager" is not really an option at Google. AWS does this very proactively.

Unfortunately after 5 years, I can still see Google Cloud screwing over their customers like this. They seem determined to send more customers to AWS.

This is an easy way to accelerate the sale without having to do any of the leg work. The same thing happens when people use procurement vendors like SHI.

As a sales person I'm thinking sweet, I get to send a PO to SHI for example, I don't have to negotiate price, volume discounts, or go back and forth with legal departments depending on whos paper we used. You just need to approve and I get paid, probably quicker than if I used an internal deal desk.

TOTALLY.

I had amazing AWS reps, that I had a good personal relationship. Request your rep to visit your office, and have lunch.

Seriously.

The best reps I had from AWS moved to GCP, and while I couldnt move my loads from AWS to GCP, I still had a good relationship with them. One of the best things an account rep can do is understand your business, and, in my case, actually pushed for changes in the system to our benefit based on how we were using the system.

They have evolved a lot since that occurred, but a good rep is going to seriously push for your success. (They want you to be successful and increase your use! :-) and thats a good ting)

So, make requests for your reps to meet with you face to face.

Someone should invent a sue-as-a-service ("SaaS") where you can just sue companies in a couple clicks if they shutdown your services or have bad account management that leads to downtime.

Considering the problems are repetetetive, the legal documents can easily be templated and reused and the victim would not have to waste much time or effort in court. Scale the lawyers just like we scale cloud instances.

Maybe even have a way to programmatically sue based on automated downtime metrics.

The reason this hasn't been done is that the ToS for all enterprise-scale cloud services would prevent success, either by requiring arbitration vs. litigation, or via a disclaimer of liability.

If it's so easy to prevent someone from ligitating why don't all small businesses do this? For example, why don't restaurants have you sign a ToS on the menu saying that by ordering you agree to not ligitate?

The Google search URL linked below returns 285M results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=restaurant+customer+%22terms...

Isn't that what a class-action lawsuit is for?

I don't know how to start one. It would be nice to have an API to deal with that for me.

This is sound advice in my experience. The last company I worked with who was utilizing Google Cloud had a great experience, an account manager and a reseller who offered training as well.

after Azure sunk my employers project with no recourse or discussion allowed, I always advise everyone I meet to run far away from Azure if they value a reliable service.

"No discussion allowed" sounds impressive, almost like legal impetus was involved. What parts of the story can be shared?

I think when the parent commend said "no discussion allowed", it was in the context of "no recourse", not that they got some sort of a pseudo-gag-order.

I.e., basically meaning that Azure refused having any further discussions between then and the parent user, as attempts to resolve that specific case. Not that they dont't allow the parent comment user to talk about it with others on HN (or elsewhere).

Pretty sure your parent poster just meant "they cut you off and you can't do absolutely anything about it".

I dug into the archives, every attempt to discuss or resolve the issue got shut down with the boilerplate text of:

=============================

Greetings for the day!

I have received an update from Account Research Team: As part of our strong commitment to the protection of our customers and our interest in preserving the quality and integrity of the Azure Marketplace, we perform supplementary reviews of accounts which may exhibit irregular or suspicious activity. Your account was selected for one of these reviews and after careful consideration, this account will remain closed.

Please understand that we keep security checks like these in place in order to protect the quality and integrity of the Azure Marketplace

=============================================================

The ridiculous thing.. my employer makes huge use of Office365? We signed up for Azure via a slightly different path with no issues.. but I know this could be pure chance it just happens to work as the service could be teetering on a precipice of arbitrary policy application and the rug could be pulled from under it any second with the same infuratingly cheery account deletion..

lol. trying to get an actual human being at google to talk to you is an insane task if you’re not a substantial sized account.

That’s a good suggestion - it worth noting it comes with a cost (eg X% of your cloud bill) but you get much better interaction with the support and service team.

AWS sometimes even connects small players with service team PMs and managers. It was really great but probably only for greenfield services

> it worth noting it comes with a cost (eg X% of your cloud bill) but you get much better interaction with the support and service team.

An account manager doesn't cost you anything - neither would a CE (or SE). There would likely be a minimum spend required, or if you're below that a commit, but there's no %age of annual spend charged for having an AM. In reality, and AM will save you money, as you can negotiate with them, whereas you can't with a website.

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