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There's nothing about Apple, banks or cable companies that are entirely "machine run". In fact they're the exact opposite of Google in that they invest signific

by IBM 8y ago

There's nothing about Apple, banks or cable companies that are entirely "machine run". In fact they're the exact opposite of Google in that they invest significantly in customer support.

vortico 8y ago
Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software, or Apple to discuss a business deal, or a cable rep to negotiate a price? No, they're all too large for me to be worth their time, so I spend 98% of the time looking at a machine-served webpage or a machine on the other end of the telephone in their attempt to make me annoyed enough to drop my question. Those services are simply not profitable enough to justify the time spent talking to their customers. This is why I pay premium for services, which are often smaller with happy employees to communicate with me.
- nickodell 8y ago
  I have had good luck with Apple support treating me like a real person. For example, I once called them about getting rEFIt and dual boot working on a Mac Mini, and the support guy did his best to figure out how to help me, even though it is definitely not supported and it is a very unusual configuration. Was I talking to an Apple developer? No, but I'm not asking them to implement a new feature on my behalf, so I don't expect to. YMMV.
- dorian-graph 8y ago
  I made a stupid mistake to do with iCloud and after talking to the support manager who wanted to help, but there were some technical details they weren't completely confident in discussing, I was able to talk to a software engineer and decide what to do withe possible recovery options.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  You don't think that developers might have things to do other than answer your support queries?
  - vortico 8y ago
    I'm primarily talking about companies that require more than basic customer support, not users who need help installing iPhoto (since this is Hacker News by Ycombinator after all). If you build your company upon the assumption that your target operating systems work without interaction with the vendor, good luck! Even if you're a $1m revenue startup targeting iOS or Mac, you will run into a blocking issue and discover that all Apple employees other than support and PR are outright banned from communicating with external parties about their products. No Apple employees are allowed to participate in their own public forums except in exceptional circumstances, and their "developer support" team seems to only be capable of copy-pasting vaguely relevant links from apple.com. Compare this to companies like Mozilla, GitHub, and even Adobe, who allow developers to be open and honest about issues that companies and individuals bring up. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the worst. Microsoft is decent and is fairly receptive to "user companies" if the issue is important enough.
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      I will admit I was being a bit facetious. I work in a company that sells B2B software for developers, and as developers we do sometimes talk directly to our customers, it's a lot faster having a person on each side debugging the problem. But our software does cost upwards of $5000 per year, so they certainly pay for that level of support. I do understand why Apple bans people from helping outside of official support channels. Imagine how annoying it would be if you were in support and talking to a customer who is now telling you that an Apple developer somewhere on the internet suggested you try some solution that didn't work or even made things worse.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    No they do not have better things to do. Most developers should be required to spend time with support queries. They might get a better understanding of what they are building and a little more perspective.
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      I'm going to contradict my earlier comment and say that I agree with you. At my old company, they made devs do 2 hours of support a week, that was frontline support, so we got all the bullshit queries. It definitely helped resolve some common issues. For instance, we got a lot of support queries about people forgetting their password. There was a reset password option, but it wasn't large on the screen, so customers missed it. I made a fix, so that if they got their password wrong, there was a nice big message with the forgot password link. We didn't have a single forgotten password query after that. It was a 10 minute fix. There were a lot of other support queries that had easy fixes that didn't make it back to the devs.
- comex 8y ago
  > Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software Yes, if you use one of the two "Technical Support Incidents" per year you get as part of the standard (paid) developer program: https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/ https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/ There's also Radar (which despite its reputation as a black hole does reach engineers), and WWDC.
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    Can confirm that you can actually reach developers at Apple by contacting DTS (developer technical support). However, in my experience, the answer was either "sorry that's out of scope" or "can you please report this as a bug" or "this feature intentionally doesn't do what you want.
    - chris_wot 8y ago
      I once found a bug in Safari that affected reading LibreOffice's OpenGrok instance on iPads. I reported it to Apple, but eventually I managed to find the radar incident, then I was able to find the WebKit Safari commit where an Apple person fixed it. I emailed him directly and he very nicely replied, though there wasn't anything he could do. This all worked outside the Apple support system. Ironically, Apple probably have the best consumer support system out of anyone, and they are still not brilliant.
  - vortico 8y ago
    Do you know if they allow companies to purchase more than two?
    - karoofish 8y ago
      Yes you can. "Additional TSIs are available for purchase in either a 2-pack for $99 USD or 5-Pack for $249 USD in the Code-level Support section in your account."
      - vortico 8y ago
bad_user 8y ago
That Google doesn't provide support is a myth. They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite. You can get somebody on the phone no matter the timezone and the issues I've had with G Suite thus far have all been fixed. And Blender did mention that they had access to higher level support actually, due to their channel being popular. Support people however are often powerless and what happened to Blender seems to be human error. People speak of Microsoft's support being good for example. Remember the Skype transition to Microsoft accounts? I lost half my address book in that transition, contacted their support and they kept insisting that it isn't true and that I might be having a second Skype account. After several attempts with different people, I couldn't get them to transfer me to somebody technical that can recognize this is a bug. I gave up eventually and lost Skype IDs of people I've know for a long time. Microsoft's support is shit, it's as if it doesn't exist in some situations actually and yet people don't mention Microsoft as having poor support. Is that because you can get a dummy to read textbook replies back at you? I'll never know.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Support people however are often powerless I don’t think it’s possible to label someone as support if they’re powerless.
  - vortico 8y ago
    That's what the company calls the team anyhow.
    - tyfon 8y ago
      They can't call them "customer deflection team" :) AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    If the service / product has limitations that need to be fixed (aka bugs), then support is powerless because it depends on the policies, the timeline, the priorities of the development team. To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.

by IBM 8y ago

There's nothing about Apple, banks or cable companies that are entirely "machine run". In fact they're the exact opposite of Google in that they invest significantly in customer support.

vortico 8y ago

Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software, or Apple to discuss a business deal, or a cable rep to negotiate a price? No, they're all too large for me to be worth their time, so I spend 98% of the time looking at a machine-served webpage or a machine on the other end of the telephone in their attempt to make me annoyed enough to drop my question. Those services are simply not profitable enough to justify the time spent talking to their customers. This is why I pay premium for services, which are often smaller with happy employees to communicate with me.

nickodell 8y ago
I have had good luck with Apple support treating me like a real person. For example, I once called them about getting rEFIt and dual boot working on a Mac Mini, and the support guy did his best to figure out how to help me, even though it is definitely not supported and it is a very unusual configuration. Was I talking to an Apple developer? No, but I'm not asking them to implement a new feature on my behalf, so I don't expect to. YMMV.
dorian-graph 8y ago
I made a stupid mistake to do with iCloud and after talking to the support manager who wanted to help, but there were some technical details they weren't completely confident in discussing, I was able to talk to a software engineer and decide what to do withe possible recovery options.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
You don't think that developers might have things to do other than answer your support queries?
- vortico 8y ago
  I'm primarily talking about companies that require more than basic customer support, not users who need help installing iPhoto (since this is Hacker News by Ycombinator after all). If you build your company upon the assumption that your target operating systems work without interaction with the vendor, good luck! Even if you're a $1m revenue startup targeting iOS or Mac, you will run into a blocking issue and discover that all Apple employees other than support and PR are outright banned from communicating with external parties about their products. No Apple employees are allowed to participate in their own public forums except in exceptional circumstances, and their "developer support" team seems to only be capable of copy-pasting vaguely relevant links from apple.com. Compare this to companies like Mozilla, GitHub, and even Adobe, who allow developers to be open and honest about issues that companies and individuals bring up. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the worst. Microsoft is decent and is fairly receptive to "user companies" if the issue is important enough.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    I will admit I was being a bit facetious. I work in a company that sells B2B software for developers, and as developers we do sometimes talk directly to our customers, it's a lot faster having a person on each side debugging the problem. But our software does cost upwards of $5000 per year, so they certainly pay for that level of support. I do understand why Apple bans people from helping outside of official support channels. Imagine how annoying it would be if you were in support and talking to a customer who is now telling you that an Apple developer somewhere on the internet suggested you try some solution that didn't work or even made things worse.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  No they do not have better things to do. Most developers should be required to spend time with support queries. They might get a better understanding of what they are building and a little more perspective.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    I'm going to contradict my earlier comment and say that I agree with you. At my old company, they made devs do 2 hours of support a week, that was frontline support, so we got all the bullshit queries. It definitely helped resolve some common issues. For instance, we got a lot of support queries about people forgetting their password. There was a reset password option, but it wasn't large on the screen, so customers missed it. I made a fix, so that if they got their password wrong, there was a nice big message with the forgot password link. We didn't have a single forgotten password query after that. It was a 10 minute fix. There were a lot of other support queries that had easy fixes that didn't make it back to the devs.
comex 8y ago
> Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software Yes, if you use one of the two "Technical Support Incidents" per year you get as part of the standard (paid) developer program: https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/ https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/ There's also Radar (which despite its reputation as a black hole does reach engineers), and WWDC.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  Can confirm that you can actually reach developers at Apple by contacting DTS (developer technical support). However, in my experience, the answer was either "sorry that's out of scope" or "can you please report this as a bug" or "this feature intentionally doesn't do what you want.
  - chris_wot 8y ago
    I once found a bug in Safari that affected reading LibreOffice's OpenGrok instance on iPads. I reported it to Apple, but eventually I managed to find the radar incident, then I was able to find the WebKit Safari commit where an Apple person fixed it. I emailed him directly and he very nicely replied, though there wasn't anything he could do. This all worked outside the Apple support system. Ironically, Apple probably have the best consumer support system out of anyone, and they are still not brilliant.
- vortico 8y ago
  Do you know if they allow companies to purchase more than two?
  - karoofish 8y ago
    Yes you can. "Additional TSIs are available for purchase in either a 2-pack for $99 USD or 5-Pack for $249 USD in the Code-level Support section in your account."
    - vortico 8y ago

bad_user 8y ago

That Google doesn't provide support is a myth. They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite. You can get somebody on the phone no matter the timezone and the issues I've had with G Suite thus far have all been fixed. And Blender did mention that they had access to higher level support actually, due to their channel being popular. Support people however are often powerless and what happened to Blender seems to be human error. People speak of Microsoft's support being good for example. Remember the Skype transition to Microsoft accounts? I lost half my address book in that transition, contacted their support and they kept insisting that it isn't true and that I might be having a second Skype account. After several attempts with different people, I couldn't get them to transfer me to somebody technical that can recognize this is a bug. I gave up eventually and lost Skype IDs of people I've know for a long time. Microsoft's support is shit, it's as if it doesn't exist in some situations actually and yet people don't mention Microsoft as having poor support. Is that because you can get a dummy to read textbook replies back at you? I'll never know.

robin_reala 8y ago
Support people however are often powerless I don’t think it’s possible to label someone as support if they’re powerless.
- vortico 8y ago
  That's what the company calls the team anyhow.
  - tyfon 8y ago
    They can't call them "customer deflection team" :) AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.
- bad_user 8y ago
  If the service / product has limitations that need to be fixed (aka bugs), then support is powerless because it depends on the policies, the timeline, the priorities of the development team. To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.