Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopurpose | Hacker News Reader

I miss good and responsive support. I mostly deal with Google GCP and it's soul draining. They always take close to 24 hours to reply to any of your comment, even if you immediately reply you won't hear from them until next day. They cherry pick one line to answer and their replies often contradict rest of the facts presented in the issue report. They shield product engineers from you, acting as intermediary, so now there are two 24 hour hops each way. When product engineer also give nonsense answer, support doesn't enter into discussion with them on your behalf to get something reasonable, no they just pass it along.

For the price they charge for support I'd expect more quality.

View on HN

There is very little incentive for engineers to spend a lot of time on support at big tech. In fact it detracts time from their projects which tie to their performance review.

Internally big tech would need to prioritise customer satisfaction as some OKR to incentivise engineers - but this doesn’t happen for some reason. As a result you’re at the whim of whether the engineer cares enough to spend time on your case.

Note in my experience AWS has great support - so their internal incentives seem to be aligned with customers.

I see comments like this on HN frequently and I wonder what is going on with BigTech. I guess I wouldn't make it. Support is fun. You're solving mysteries and (hopefully) fixing them within the constraints of the design.

Level 2 support is fun. Level 1 support is "dealing with an onslaught of people whose days have gone wrong, and they're sure it's your fault".

It's the performance culture at these companies. An engineer gets evaluated on metrics they move the needle on. At very OKR centric companies like Google, these metrics have to tie into high level business goals like revenue growth. I imagine it is pretty difficult to match customer support metrics to these, hence it's not prioritised by engineers or the company.

Support engineers are usually a completely different team and unrelated to engineering teams.

Support engineers are first or second line support, and typically limit their scope to customer errors/pebkacs. If you find a legitimate bug, it is typically escalated to the SWE team's oncall who maintain the service. For example, I found a legitimate bug in ALBs (new at the time) and was talking directly with the SWEs who built ALBs.

This is not a difficult problem to solve, if the corporation wants it solved.

We managed it by assigning someone to support on a rotating weekly basis. During that week, project hours missed due to support tasks were acceptable. If you had a critical task due and it was your support week, you could swap support with someone, or we'd reassign the task. But with Software being the "last line of defense" after Field Service and Product Technical Support, we couldn't just ignore it.

There are solutions. You just have to act like you want it solved.

I honestly think this is the best way to do it. I know a lot of software developers don't want to do this and I understand why.

But there's nothing like an engineer seeing the struggles people have for themselves and choosing to fix it so they don't have to field that damned question anymore (I'm saying this tongue-in-cheek).

Plus, you know as well as I do, the more people between your customers and your engineers, the more agenda's get injected into the mix.

The company had a voluntary program (for a while) where you got to shadow specific local customers for a day. It was unbelievable. I had been there about 2 hours before I had a long list of potential product ideas just from watching this guy struggle. Not just with our product, but mainly with the interaction between all the different machines and instruments he had to use to get his work done.

This makes sense if you consider the size of the product engineering team vs the amount of customers out there. For every engineer there's probably hundreds or thousands of customers. If they had to engage immediately with every support case, there would be zero progress on any other job.

The problem actually comes from the fact that big tech is becoming increasingly cheap on creating good support organizations. Experienced support engineers are fired and replaced with outsourced low-cost inexperienced personnel. In most cases, issues can be resolved or worked around with the help of a support engineer with access to some extra knobs. When those engineers are removed and are replaced with people who act like a pipe for cat to send the customer's stdout to product engineers, you get what you describe.

I recently had a conversation with a large tech company that went basically "We saved a ton of money by replacing all of tier 1 support with AI chatbots so that the problem can be identified and routed to the correct tier 2 person to triage before it goes to a tier 3 person if it needs to. Next we're replacing all of the tier 2 people and the only time we have to get an expensive human involved are the weirdest/most difficult problems." My reply: "where do tier 3 people come from if they have no experience at tier 1 or 2". Queue the sound of crickets...

The end goal is to only offer chat bots and thoughts and prayers

That perfectly described my team. Everyone hated on call. We shared an on call and were responsible for multiple systems that few people understood. Customers have questions and you just don't know and it's not documented. Every week you'd be on call there'd be 5-10 open support cases already open from last week. You have no context and no docs so you give a bs answer and pass it to the next customer.

In the case of GCP, they outsource their support services to smaller companies who (as I’ve been told) have no access to any details of the customer’s environment, and may sometimes escalate to a contact point within Google if the issue is not solved after some level of troubleshooting.

The list of companies providing support for GCP can be found in their subprocessors list.

I’ve had them debug and fix cloud function for me.

I thought that was above and beyond, but honestly I don’t know the support contract my company had with GCP

Reply on news.ycombinator.com