Comment by mochomocha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mochomocha | Hacker News Reader

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> Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going to change anything.

I am of the opposite sentiment. I think it would do wonders. It's very easy in a mega-corp to completely lose track of what the product is, who the customers are. And my intuition is that most VPs at mega-corps think about products in the abstract and focus more on politics & empire building/strategy than actually caring about the customers - and it definitely shows for companies like Google.

Just last week I tried to spawn a GPU instance on GCP, and despite being very familiar with the space (I work on cloud infra), after 20 minutes of fighting the overly complex UI and ridiculously broken flows, I still hadn't my instance up. In the next 3 minutes, I signed up for Lambda Labs, entered a CC, clicked a single button and ssh'ed into my VM.

That's what any start-up focuses on: the product. And that's why they always win over bloated mega-corps focused on internal processes and infighting, whose employees self-select for being complacent about mediocre products as long as the monopoly keeps printing fat paychecks.

It’s an incredibly condescending exercise, both to the managers (lol at a reduction of meeting time, is the assumption that managers go to meetings for fun?), and to the people who actually run support (who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers).

Google’s products aren’t bad because the VP’s have lost the meaning of holding your customer dear. Maybe their senior managers are stuffed with former startup founders, all visionaries in their own minds, who collect big windfalls to join, play at empire building for a few years, then quit in a huff and blog about how it’s everyone else’s fault.

> (lol at a reduction of meeting time, is the assumption that managers go to meetings for fun?

This assumption that every manager has complete agency over their own meeting schedule is equally flawed. I've never attended a meeting for fun, but I've attended countless meetings that were of absolutely zero value to me just because someone up the food chain from me decided I should be there.

> who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers

I'd argue that managers being untrained in customer service and, especially, resentful of being forced to do it illustrates the author's point pretty well.

In my opinion, managers with little understanding of the customer experience should be condescended to. If they think it's beneath them to do a little actual work, doubly so.

I have limited knowledge about Google, but this sounds overly simplistic for at least GCP.

Large contracts are locked behind FedRAMP compliance, DoD ILx, and so on, and I happen to know that all large cloud providers listen very closely to customers in this space.

Your harsh criticism is valid under the assumption that GCP is an unsuccessful consumer product. I think it is only partially so and features are mostly driven by larger b2b and governments, where it is successful (in the sense that it delivers most features customers care about).

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