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I want to put on end to the "you can't contact Google" comments that comes up every time Google Cloud makes the front page. You can contact Google Cloud. They

I want to put on end to the "you can't contact Google" comments that comes up every time Google Cloud makes the front page. You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS. We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s). Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too. The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent Escalate button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support. If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.

nikanj 7y ago
In one corner, I have the good experience of you, a semi-anonymous internet commentor. In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN. I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.
- jerf 7y ago
  Most of those Google support stories aren't about GCP, though. It's things like app support, or Gmail support, etc.
  - nikanj 7y ago
    People, me included, just remember Google doesn't support their products. I won't be arsed to consult a list of Google products and properties to see if this particular one is going to get support or not. If I buy something from Microsoft, I can contact Microsoft support. I don't have to roll the dice on it being actually supported by Microsoft, or only supported by other desperate users on an abandoned phpBB somewhere.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Figuring out whether a vendor will care about their customers in a given situation has a very simple, very universal "worst-case rule": if you're paying the vendor, and your "account" (in the financial sense) is typewise-indistinguishable from other accounts, of customers who pay the vendor ridiculously-huge amounts of money, then there will be a good support process for you. Why? Because big-spender enterprise customers demand that vendors implement hand-holding red-carpet VIP support for them; and most of that work is, surprisingly enough, a capital cost, not an operational expense; and so you can free-ride on it as long as it's been set up. On the other hand, if there is any way to typewise-differentiate you from the big-spender customers, then you'd better believe that they'll have support channels you don't have.
    - susijdjdjxa 7y ago
      I don’t buy this claim that Microsoft has good support for all their products. If my Windows machine is running slow will Microsoft support help me? Why do my family members keep asking me for help with their computers if Microsoft support is so great? To me, the idea of getting good support on any consumer software is laughable, and has no bearing on Google.
      - 7y ago
teddyuk 7y ago
I don’t know if you still can but it used to be that with Microsoft premier support if you passed some specific exams you could bypass the first tier (who were excellent engineers) and go straight to escalation/ cpr engineers
choppaface 7y ago
I’ve had a similar experience where I could email PMs and we even had Google forward deployed engineers on-site. The trouble is that their customer service is terrible. We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my screen. The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing. Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole system for 10-20 seconds incessantly. If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of credits.
- slovenlyrobot 7y ago
  I had a 4 roundtrip email thread with their support over a speech API bug. Eventually sent them a narrated step-by-step screencast, and the guy is finally like "oh, it's not supposed to work that way." (Yes, that's what I said in e-mail 1!)
  - stingraycharles 7y ago
    To be perfectly fair, I have had these types of experiences (plus more) with AWS as well. Their solution engineers are pretty useless, bugs in products never get solved and you get endless forwards and escalations on their issue tracker. I think in general, scaling support for such complex a product that’s constantly changing is really difficult.
  - dilyevsky 7y ago
    4 rt? You got off scot-free! I had several multi-week threads with daily posts for something that should’ve been a p1 bug fix on their end.
- 7y ago
manigandham 7y ago
You're mostly likely getting lucky. We've gone through their highest tier startup program and have had so many account reps assigned that most aren't even with the company anymore. The ones that are don't reply to emails either. GCP is the absolute worst at human support. Of course you get responses when you pay for support (since you're paying) but even then we've had several instances of refunded support costs because of a lack of reply over their SLA.
ec109685 7y ago
With Slack, anyone in the organization can file a ticket and get a human to respond in a few hours. If something isn’t great about Google Sheets (or of their cloud offerings), I have no idea how to submit and issue that will get attention of someone at google. They lose big time for this stance.
kkapelon 7y ago
>Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team This implies that you live/work close to a Google office. Correct?
golergka 7y ago
Well, that's Google brand power for you: when one of their services has support that isn't shitty, nobody believes it anyway.
neop1x 7y ago
Slack? "This invite link is no longer active.". Their official Slack link in the docs: https://googlecloud-community.slack.com/join/shared_invite/enQtNzM1NDk1MzU2NjQwLTA2MTFkMTAxZjk3N2Q1MmExMTExZTk5MDI4NTM4Y2UzYWI5YjQyOTQyYzUzZDdlYTQ0YzQ5N2M3Y2VkZDg4NDI https://googlecloud-community.slack.com/join/shared_invite/e...

nikanj 7y ago

In one corner, I have the good experience of you, a semi-anonymous internet commentor. In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN. I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.

jerf 7y ago
Most of those Google support stories aren't about GCP, though. It's things like app support, or Gmail support, etc.
- nikanj 7y ago
  People, me included, just remember Google doesn't support their products. I won't be arsed to consult a list of Google products and properties to see if this particular one is going to get support or not. If I buy something from Microsoft, I can contact Microsoft support. I don't have to roll the dice on it being actually supported by Microsoft, or only supported by other desperate users on an abandoned phpBB somewhere.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Figuring out whether a vendor will care about their customers in a given situation has a very simple, very universal "worst-case rule": if you're paying the vendor, and your "account" (in the financial sense) is typewise-indistinguishable from other accounts, of customers who pay the vendor ridiculously-huge amounts of money, then there will be a good support process for you. Why? Because big-spender enterprise customers demand that vendors implement hand-holding red-carpet VIP support for them; and most of that work is, surprisingly enough, a capital cost, not an operational expense; and so you can free-ride on it as long as it's been set up. On the other hand, if there is any way to typewise-differentiate you from the big-spender customers, then you'd better believe that they'll have support channels you don't have.
  - susijdjdjxa 7y ago
    I don’t buy this claim that Microsoft has good support for all their products. If my Windows machine is running slow will Microsoft support help me? Why do my family members keep asking me for help with their computers if Microsoft support is so great? To me, the idea of getting good support on any consumer software is laughable, and has no bearing on Google.
    - 7y ago

teddyuk 7y ago

I don’t know if you still can but it used to be that with Microsoft premier support if you passed some specific exams you could bypass the first tier (who were excellent engineers) and go straight to escalation/ cpr engineers

choppaface 7y ago

I’ve had a similar experience where I could email PMs and we even had Google forward deployed engineers on-site. The trouble is that their customer service is terrible. We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my screen. The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing. Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole system for 10-20 seconds incessantly. If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of credits.

slovenlyrobot 7y ago
I had a 4 roundtrip email thread with their support over a speech API bug. Eventually sent them a narrated step-by-step screencast, and the guy is finally like "oh, it's not supposed to work that way." (Yes, that's what I said in e-mail 1!)
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  To be perfectly fair, I have had these types of experiences (plus more) with AWS as well. Their solution engineers are pretty useless, bugs in products never get solved and you get endless forwards and escalations on their issue tracker. I think in general, scaling support for such complex a product that’s constantly changing is really difficult.
- dilyevsky 7y ago
  4 rt? You got off scot-free! I had several multi-week threads with daily posts for something that should’ve been a p1 bug fix on their end.
7y ago

manigandham 7y ago

You're mostly likely getting lucky. We've gone through their highest tier startup program and have had so many account reps assigned that most aren't even with the company anymore. The ones that are don't reply to emails either. GCP is the absolute worst at human support. Of course you get responses when you pay for support (since you're paying) but even then we've had several instances of refunded support costs because of a lack of reply over their SLA.

ec109685 7y ago

With Slack, anyone in the organization can file a ticket and get a human to respond in a few hours. If something isn’t great about Google Sheets (or of their cloud offerings), I have no idea how to submit and issue that will get attention of someone at google. They lose big time for this stance.

kkapelon 7y ago

>Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team This implies that you live/work close to a Google office. Correct?

golergka 7y ago

Well, that's Google brand power for you: when one of their services has support that isn't shitty, nobody believes it anyway.

neop1x 7y ago

Slack? "This invite link is no longer active.". Their official Slack link in the docs: https://googlecloud-community.slack.com/join/shared_invite/enQtNzM1NDk1MzU2NjQwLTA2MTFkMTAxZjk3N2Q1MmExMTExZTk5MDI4NTM4Y2UzYWI5YjQyOTQyYzUzZDdlYTQ0YzQ5N2M3Y2VkZDg4NDI https://googlecloud-community.slack.com/join/shared_invite/e...