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Google support is basically non existent for customers even spending like 5-10K a month on their platform. Even questions you raise on their Reddit sub go unno

Google support is basically non existent for customers even spending like 5-10K a month on their platform. Even questions you raise on their Reddit sub go unnoticed. They don't have bunch of people actively trying to solve their customers problem. That said the only time my problems were actually listed to were from BigQuery team. Other than this, I don't think it's possible to get any explanation on a feature from any other product team at Google cloud.

doh 6y ago
We spent orders of magnitude of that and they still treated us poorly. The silver lining is that they at least don't discriminate based on the spend.
Axsuul 6y ago
Do you have a support plan?
- ellard 6y ago
  Support plans make sense for products/software that are sold and expected to operate independently (cars as always are a good example). Heck, even those products generally come with some sort of free limited time support which come in the form of warranties. Services requiring a separate support plan is... not intuitive.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Why should you need a support plan for a product you're paying for? "Ok, you can pay us $X/mo for the service, but if something goes wrong, we won't help you unless you also pay an additional $Y/mo." It's absolute garbage that this is where the industry is.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Indeed, but once growth stops, they have increase revenue somehow.
  - teej 6y ago
    This is consumer thinking, not business thinking. Every high ticket item on the planet comes with the option of a support contract.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Because some businesses want support, and others don't. Forcing the people who don't want support to pay for support seems rude, does it not?
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    Why is it bad to give the option to not pay for support you don't want? If they didn't charge separately for it, that means the cost is distributed to everyone in terms of higher costs for the service itself. If you think support is always necessary, then just do the math yourself and add in the cost of support for every product, and use that price to determine if it is worth it or not.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    I don't know, lot's of tech enterprises will give you the product for free and make it up on "support". Fortunately, a lot of these environments have forums and such which means you will eventually get help, but not soon enough if your hair is on fire.
  - orf 6y ago
    Yes, my 100$ monthly spend deserves the same support as a company with a $250,000 monthly spend.
  - anoraca 6y ago
    Because the product that you're paying for is an extremely efficient automated cloud infrastructure with little manual support, unless you're willing to pay more for it. If you want hand holding there are other less automated infrastructure providers that cost a lot more.
lima 6y ago
We made an effort to reach out to our regional GCP sales team when we moved to GCP and ended up with an account manager and solutions engineer. They've been very helpful and if we have hard questions, we can ping them. Not a huge spend by any means. We rarely have to do so, but whenever we did, they went out of their way to figure it out. YMMV, I guess?
Spooky23 6y ago
Google isn't bad with commercial accounts through normal channels. I'd personally put them in middle of the road. Their sales/se type people that I've dealt with are above average in my experience, although in the past there weren't many of them. If you're 5 people at a dentist office with GSuite, that may be a different story. That's always a problem when small entities buy direct -- that's why VARs exist to provide more handholding for smaller orgs. I've managed some pretty significant vendor relationships -- if you think they are the worst from a support POV, you're young or exceptionally lucky!
banana_giraffe 6y ago
The difference of the support plan is amazing. I had a long standing issue where I couldn't get any help, at best I get stuffed to a forum where some random other user would invariably tell me I'm doing things the wrong way and standard non-answers. We got put on their best support plan for a few months for reasons. The difference was insane. I gave them permission/creds to log into the problem box, along with steps to repo things. In a few days they had reverse engineered what was going on in our code, without having our code, figured out where the bottleneck was in the kernel, and gave me detailed steps to build a tweaked kernel that wouldn't be a problem.
cryptoquick 6y ago
I was about to say similar. My experiences with Google Support, even on their $500/mo. Gold plan, have been infuriating at best. Even their product teams are just... Depressing. There was a support ticket open for TEN YEARS for people asking for WebSockets support on Google App Engine. I often wind up with DevOps responsibilities, and I'd never recommend building more on them, and I'd help in every conceivable way to minimize money given to Google, in addition to aiding the transition to more reliable providers. And on a more personal note... My husband recently tried recovering his email. He no longer had the password, the phone number he had it registered with was no longer owned by him (a major security issue, btw), so he tried his recovery email. And even after clicking the link from his recovery email, he was denied access, and sent to the same help page that couldn't be more unhelpful if someone actively tried. And there was no apparent way to contact support from that screen. I hear tell of Gmail users who could reach Google support, but... We don't put much stock in those stories round these parts. Moral of the story? Never trust Google with your emails, or other important information. Always make backups if you must continue using them, and forward your email to an email provider you trust (ideally one that you pay for, own, and has a decent support department of any kind).
unbeli 6y ago
Perhaps Reddit isn't a preferred support channel for them?

doh 6y ago

We spent orders of magnitude of that and they still treated us poorly. The silver lining is that they at least don't discriminate based on the spend.

Axsuul 6y ago

Do you have a support plan?

ellard 6y ago
Support plans make sense for products/software that are sold and expected to operate independently (cars as always are a good example). Heck, even those products generally come with some sort of free limited time support which come in the form of warranties. Services requiring a separate support plan is... not intuitive.
kelnos 6y ago
Why should you need a support plan for a product you're paying for? "Ok, you can pay us $X/mo for the service, but if something goes wrong, we won't help you unless you also pay an additional $Y/mo." It's absolute garbage that this is where the industry is.
- mc32 6y ago
  Indeed, but once growth stops, they have increase revenue somehow.
- teej 6y ago
  This is consumer thinking, not business thinking. Every high ticket item on the planet comes with the option of a support contract.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Because some businesses want support, and others don't. Forcing the people who don't want support to pay for support seems rude, does it not?
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Why is it bad to give the option to not pay for support you don't want? If they didn't charge separately for it, that means the cost is distributed to everyone in terms of higher costs for the service itself. If you think support is always necessary, then just do the math yourself and add in the cost of support for every product, and use that price to determine if it is worth it or not.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  I don't know, lot's of tech enterprises will give you the product for free and make it up on "support". Fortunately, a lot of these environments have forums and such which means you will eventually get help, but not soon enough if your hair is on fire.
- orf 6y ago
  Yes, my 100$ monthly spend deserves the same support as a company with a $250,000 monthly spend.
- anoraca 6y ago
  Because the product that you're paying for is an extremely efficient automated cloud infrastructure with little manual support, unless you're willing to pay more for it. If you want hand holding there are other less automated infrastructure providers that cost a lot more.

lima 6y ago

We made an effort to reach out to our regional GCP sales team when we moved to GCP and ended up with an account manager and solutions engineer. They've been very helpful and if we have hard questions, we can ping them. Not a huge spend by any means. We rarely have to do so, but whenever we did, they went out of their way to figure it out. YMMV, I guess?

Spooky23 6y ago

Google isn't bad with commercial accounts through normal channels. I'd personally put them in middle of the road. Their sales/se type people that I've dealt with are above average in my experience, although in the past there weren't many of them. If you're 5 people at a dentist office with GSuite, that may be a different story. That's always a problem when small entities buy direct -- that's why VARs exist to provide more handholding for smaller orgs. I've managed some pretty significant vendor relationships -- if you think they are the worst from a support POV, you're young or exceptionally lucky!

banana_giraffe 6y ago

The difference of the support plan is amazing. I had a long standing issue where I couldn't get any help, at best I get stuffed to a forum where some random other user would invariably tell me I'm doing things the wrong way and standard non-answers. We got put on their best support plan for a few months for reasons. The difference was insane. I gave them permission/creds to log into the problem box, along with steps to repo things. In a few days they had reverse engineered what was going on in our code, without having our code, figured out where the bottleneck was in the kernel, and gave me detailed steps to build a tweaked kernel that wouldn't be a problem.

cryptoquick 6y ago

I was about to say similar. My experiences with Google Support, even on their $500/mo. Gold plan, have been infuriating at best. Even their product teams are just... Depressing. There was a support ticket open for TEN YEARS for people asking for WebSockets support on Google App Engine. I often wind up with DevOps responsibilities, and I'd never recommend building more on them, and I'd help in every conceivable way to minimize money given to Google, in addition to aiding the transition to more reliable providers. And on a more personal note... My husband recently tried recovering his email. He no longer had the password, the phone number he had it registered with was no longer owned by him (a major security issue, btw), so he tried his recovery email. And even after clicking the link from his recovery email, he was denied access, and sent to the same help page that couldn't be more unhelpful if someone actively tried. And there was no apparent way to contact support from that screen. I hear tell of Gmail users who could reach Google support, but... We don't put much stock in those stories round these parts. Moral of the story? Never trust Google with your emails, or other important information. Always make backups if you must continue using them, and forward your email to an email provider you trust (ideally one that you pay for, own, and has a decent support department of any kind).

unbeli 6y ago

Perhaps Reddit isn't a preferred support channel for them?