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I don't understand why people are ever surprised about Google offering substandard support for really anything. Time and time again Google products prove to ma

I don't understand why people are ever surprised about Google offering substandard support for really anything. Time and time again Google products prove to make the happy path happier, but as soon as anything should go wrong, you're on your own with no explanation, and no support. Additionally, and as an aside to the core issue here, I've found the recent Google Cloud UI updates to be a real pain. When I last used them, I did acknowledge that it was beta, but I seemed to lose an awful lot of oversight of an awful lot of things. It's put me seriously off it vs. AWS.

blakeyrat 10y ago
Well, if it's something like YouTube you can kind of "forgive" their awful customer service in exchange for the free hosting and search features. It's a heck of a lot less forgivable for a product you pay actual money to use. The support page telling you to use a widget that doesn't exist is really going above and beyond in the realm of user-hostility.
- burgreblast 10y ago
  FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist. When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist. The button isn't there. Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    > When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. Maybe they expect you to cancel the card upon deleting an account. It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. Not many look at their credit card statement anyways.
    - Xorlev 10y ago
      > It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. It can be, especially when you're using something like Stripe. It only takes one failed call without retries (or a period of time where networking isn't working quite right) for an account to be orphaned. Arguably, those sorts of calls should be durably queued and retried until success, but it often doesn't happen. PM decides it's cheaper to have support field the one-off requests than to spend a few days making those changes. Later on, another developer accidentally disables the call and there isn't sufficient test coverage for disabling billing on account removal. It's a story that'll be repeated over and over.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    The easiest way to fix it is to click the fraud button on your cc account =P
    - burgreblast 10y ago
      Nice if it were that easy. But for business accounts you want to delete one (or more) licenses. Look at the form 2/3 of the way down and ask if this makes sense. https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886305-Deleting-licenses https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886...
- jwatte 10y ago
  There should be integration tests for documentation. Maybe some machine learning could be applied to that? Maybe I should set that up on some cloud service. Let me check the documentation for how to do that...
  - ben_jones 10y ago
    That's biting off way too much. You have to realize the scope of the actual problem "making humans understand something they previously do not understand". If you can do that you might as well apply it to fixing education instead.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    One of the things sandstorm.io does which makes a lot of sense, is that they regularly commit changes to their docs within the PRs that change the actual software. It's not integration tested, mind you, but the general practice means they do a pretty good job keeping their docs updated.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    Maybe Google needs to have fewer robots involved and more human beings?
chaostheory 10y ago
Yeah, Google tends to rely on machines too much for customer support for paid services. I understand the rationale, but it's just not good enough compared to real people handling customer support... yet
0xmohit 10y ago
> It's put me seriously off it vs. AWS. Can't really compare, but AWS isn't great either. I've experienced instances when an instance (1) shut down, (2) rebooted on it's own. AWS support would point you to the SLA if you were to report the incident.
- sargun 10y ago
  EC2 instances are meant to be ephemeral.
  - bpicolo 10y ago
    That doesn't sound factual at all. Got docs which support that? They send us emails every time they plan on doing intentional maintenance on our instances.
    - 0xmohit 10y ago
      I wish it wasn't true. On all the occasions, I was told that there was "an issue with the underlying hardware".
      - bpicolo 10y ago
        Sure, but that's very different than them being intended as ephemeral.
        0xmohit 10y ago
        I didn't suggest that those are ephemeral.
        jasonlotito 10y ago
        Yes, yes you did. Sargun posted: "EC2 instances are meant to be ephemeral" to which bpicolo replied: "That doesn't sound factual at all." You then replied with: "I wish it wasn't true." _it_ in this case refers to the ephemeral state of EC2 instances. You literally did suggest they were ephemeral.
peteretep 10y ago
FWIW, anecdotally the Google Fi support was pretty good

blakeyrat 10y ago

Well, if it's something like YouTube you can kind of "forgive" their awful customer service in exchange for the free hosting and search features. It's a heck of a lot less forgivable for a product you pay actual money to use. The support page telling you to use a widget that doesn't exist is really going above and beyond in the realm of user-hostility.

burgreblast 10y ago
FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist. When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist. The button isn't there. Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  > When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. Maybe they expect you to cancel the card upon deleting an account. It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. Not many look at their credit card statement anyways.
  - Xorlev 10y ago
    > It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. It can be, especially when you're using something like Stripe. It only takes one failed call without retries (or a period of time where networking isn't working quite right) for an account to be orphaned. Arguably, those sorts of calls should be durably queued and retried until success, but it often doesn't happen. PM decides it's cheaper to have support field the one-off requests than to spend a few days making those changes. Later on, another developer accidentally disables the call and there isn't sufficient test coverage for disabling billing on account removal. It's a story that'll be repeated over and over.
- x0x0 10y ago
  The easiest way to fix it is to click the fraud button on your cc account =P
  - burgreblast 10y ago
    Nice if it were that easy. But for business accounts you want to delete one (or more) licenses. Look at the form 2/3 of the way down and ask if this makes sense. https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886305-Deleting-licenses https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886...
jwatte 10y ago
There should be integration tests for documentation. Maybe some machine learning could be applied to that? Maybe I should set that up on some cloud service. Let me check the documentation for how to do that...
- ben_jones 10y ago
  That's biting off way too much. You have to realize the scope of the actual problem "making humans understand something they previously do not understand". If you can do that you might as well apply it to fixing education instead.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  One of the things sandstorm.io does which makes a lot of sense, is that they regularly commit changes to their docs within the PRs that change the actual software. It's not integration tested, mind you, but the general practice means they do a pretty good job keeping their docs updated.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Maybe Google needs to have fewer robots involved and more human beings?

chaostheory 10y ago

Yeah, Google tends to rely on machines too much for customer support for paid services. I understand the rationale, but it's just not good enough compared to real people handling customer support... yet

0xmohit 10y ago

> It's put me seriously off it vs. AWS. Can't really compare, but AWS isn't great either. I've experienced instances when an instance (1) shut down, (2) rebooted on it's own. AWS support would point you to the SLA if you were to report the incident.

sargun 10y ago
EC2 instances are meant to be ephemeral.
- bpicolo 10y ago
  That doesn't sound factual at all. Got docs which support that? They send us emails every time they plan on doing intentional maintenance on our instances.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    I wish it wasn't true. On all the occasions, I was told that there was "an issue with the underlying hardware".
    - bpicolo 10y ago
      Sure, but that's very different than them being intended as ephemeral.
      - 0xmohit 10y ago
        I didn't suggest that those are ephemeral.
        jasonlotito 10y ago
        Yes, yes you did. Sargun posted: "EC2 instances are meant to be ephemeral" to which bpicolo replied: "That doesn't sound factual at all." You then replied with: "I wish it wasn't true." _it_ in this case refers to the ephemeral state of EC2 instances. You literally did suggest they were ephemeral.

peteretep 10y ago

FWIW, anecdotally the Google Fi support was pretty good