As an aside, I am curious the motivation for customers to staff huge company support forums. In some ways, it’s nice for there to be a responsive community, but in other ways, I think a trillion dollar company should pay for excellent customer service.
E.g. in this case their volunteer customer service is left with this and there is no way to even know if Google sees this:
“Sorry Yeonjoong,
As a group of volunteers, we do not have access to user accounts and can only help by sharing our experiences. In this case there is nothing we can do. “
>For each of your apps, you must:
>Respond to user questions about paid apps or in-app purchases on time: You must respond to customer support questions within three business days. If Google contacts you about an urgent product issue, you must respond within 24 hours.
> As an aside, I am curious the motivation for customers to staff huge company support forums
My guess is it's the same motivation for those who volunteer to help others in any other support forum. Human nature does not change based on the market cap of the company (if any) behind the product. What difference do you expect between this, and Stack Overflow contributors for Microsoft SQL Server or Blender? I wouldn't expect there to be a difference in motivation: some people simply enjoy helping others (even if it's in return of made-up internet points).
For a minor explanation, support is just prohibitively expensive no matter what you do, and quite frankly the only people actually capable of support is going to be the devs who made the product for various bugs/issues, and that is just a handful of people, some of whom have left the company even.
Finding good support is also hard. I worked in product areas with dedicated support for paying customers, and the number of support staff that I would consider actually helpful is precisely 3 people, out of a few hundred. Those 3 people are paid a ton to keep them around, and while I don't know exactly what they're paid they usually get moved up and into a role that at minimum exceeds typical senior eng pay, the rest just bounce tickets back and forth collecting traces with at best a poor understanding of the product. On average no understanding.
Another problem is that a good support staff would probably do better to be a dev anyway, the knowledge required is pretty much the same, just missing development experience.
I've had experiences where they will claim that something is possible when it is absolutely not, and you have to provide a lot of supporting information to get them to see reality.
A lot of people have forgotten that you can actually call companies and they do/will assist.
Called Walmart and they got extra bike racks installed at my location. Have had to call eBay a number of times as a small-time seller. PayPal too. Got Google to replace my chromecast remote and they went through thorough troubleshooting steps before RMAing it.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions but not worth pretending that paid (by the vendor) support doesn’t exist.
I believed, until you said PayPal support was helpful. PayPal support is what I envision the DMV in Soviet Russia was like.
The outcome is support that makes you feel like you're bothering them, is barely concealing their hostility, lies about what's happening, and one wrong word and horrible, horrible things will happen to you.
That's PayPal support on the best of days, like after the support person just received a 20% raise, or had a baby. On the bad days...
I generally hate Paypal and will happily shit on them at any opportunity for all kinds of great reasons (cough, blatant theft of client funds for completely arbitrary reasons), I also don't trust them with anything but the as-temporary-as-possible storage of the least possible amount of payment funds when I have no other choice. However, weirdly, on the few occasions in which I've had to contact their customer support, they've been surprisingly friendly and helpful so far. But maybe I've just been lucky.
Same here, especially since most of the time it's an unhelpful answer that dodges the actual problem or generic advice that doesn't apply, then they mark it as solved.
Which then furthers the question, why? I could understand the odd person just trying to be helpful because they had the same problem, found the post with no solution, figured it out, then answered with theirs, but for the ones who seem to spend countless hours ranking up, either by gaming it, or the few actually being helpful, does it lead to a chance of being hired or something?
Creating a system like that almost feels like it should be illegal, almost like the companies that give extensive case studies for interviews and take the work with no intention of hiring the interviewees, or unpaid internships where they don't even bother teaching and just give grunt work.
? Maybe not in cases like this but quite a few times I've googled an issue with a google/microsoft product, found a post on their forums with an answer from a Verified Service Technician or something like that saying "Update your drivers, run sfc /scannow, and turn it off and on again", then run the same search with "reddit" at the end and got an actual answer
On the contrary, I've found those 'Microsoft experts' on the official forums to have less knowledge and poorer troubleshooting skills than a tier 1 helpdesk technician.
The community ‘experts’ on the Adobe forums can be actively hostile and rude.
I posted a question a while back questioning why After Effects drive-by installs Cinema 4D without warning, and they just could not understand why the lack of notification or consent was a problem, feeling strongly that I should shut up and be grateful even the tiniest of blessings our lords and masters at Adobe see fit to bestow upon our hard drives.
The “employees” you can talk to can't provide any help either; have a current billing issue due to a ui error, and there's no escalation path, it's just increasing unlikely variants of “try pressing the button on a brand new stock android device using the foo app in safe mode”.
I keep getting $0.49 and other random amounts charged to an ancient card by Google (one that I long ago used for the business). This is a massive nuisance but there is absolutely no way to trace these payments to anything in any of the Google products I'm using. So I have to keep this card alive and that's more than a bit problematic because that legal entity has merged with another and the bank really wants that card gone (which makes no sense, but that's what they want).
So, here I am, stuck between two idiotic bureaucracies with no way to resolve the problem on either side. Google doesn't answer to anything, the bank is - at least on paper, I've managed to stretch this for three years now - unwilling to bend their rules because the amounts are so tiny. But you can see the ghost of what I'm worried about: you'll see that if that card eventually does get cancelled that that $0.49 or whatever is a reason to lock my account or some other idiotic move.
I had a weird experience with a bank where they seemed to re-open my account after it was closed. I got a letter (as requested) within the 15 day window stating the account was closed and I wouldn't be responsible for any fees on the account in the event it opened again.
They spent most of the 15 days bombarding me with calls and emails trying to resolve it outside the CFPB, but I wanted it on record. That letter is now a PDF attached to the complaint with a complaint ID in case I have problems.
It’s unlikely they’d cancel an account for a cancelled card. Probably the fastest approach would be to just cancel it and see where you get an “update your payment!” notice.
You say that like someone who's never used Google Fi for cell service and had them shut off your account rather than use the backup payment that they told you would stop such a thing.
this is a simple problem. Google is doing weird stuff, not replying to your questions - clearly not something you want to have a relationship with. So move away from google, cancel your card, problem solved.
'simple' in that the solution is obvious.
If this obvious solution is unrealistic for you, then you have made yourself too dependent on google, or are just unwilling to solve the problem. In both cases just stop whining.
Having done pretty much this a lifetime ago: A lot of the first level bug support work is basically deduplication (Incl "have you tried...") and asking for aditional/specific information. Excessively browsing a bug tracker is one of the best qualifications, and if you're doing so anyway, why not also help a few lost users here and there? At least that's where it starts... :D
I am sure that whoever created this ticket had checked a couple of things (trash/bin) and was adamant that the state of the 'drive' was back in May 2023.
Considering through the amount of times that someone said "did you try turning it off and on again?" AND it has has solved the problem, make such forum users/helpers like that very useful.
This is not true, Googlers (at least Kirkland office based ones) can file an internal ticket if they care.
Hence the common recommendation to start spamming first.last@Google.com addresses until you annoy someone internal who is willing to file a ticket on your behalf if you don't have any capable Googlers in your social graph.
At least when I worked at Google over a decade ago, I'm pretty sure first.last@Google.com didn't route to my inbox. (And roughly 70 people worldwide share my surname, according to one of those sites that shows you where people with your surname live.)
I was Googling Pixel Watch 2 carrier availability for the Australian market and ended up on the Google Support thread where someone had asked when certain carriers will get the watch. The "accepted answer" was one of these support volunteers who was based in Europe and all they had done was regurgitated the support article and pretended it was an authoritative answer. They added no value whatsoever and caused the thread to be over thanks to their "accepted answer".
I was confused why someone had wasted their time doing this, so I snooped around a bit. As far as I can tell it's a CV building exercise for some people and nothing more.
Adobe forum is terrible for this, their "MVPs" will dismiss your question right away often without even understand it and then it'll just be the accepted answer, and that's at best often they'll talk to you with condescension, claim you're doing it wrong, claim it works fine for them, claim it's not really a real issue etc.
I actually had what appears to be a real Adobe dev pop up and tell me to delete two files from my installation which actually solved the problem I've had for half a year with Photoshop crashing on startup. I guess they are out there somewhere!
A page ( https://github.com/pricing , I am a verified teacher, what happens if I already subscribed to co-pilot ) clearly tells me to contact support. I've decided it's simply impossible to contact anyone at github, every attempt just leads to an automated reply and my post being closed. I'm not sure there is anyone there. I tried posting ont he help forum, where I (of course) never got a reply.
This has made me make sure nothing I care about is only on github -- as I don't expect to any recieve any help if I have any other problems in future. I should of course be careful anyway, but when you hit these problems you realise quite how hard it is to contact any modern large company.
It’s impossible to get them to respond to my emails with a paid account. I have an enterprise account with a dedicated rep. To increase the number of seats on your contract you have to request that they do it. I had run out of seats and with a new dev starting it took a few days and emails to get the guy to do anything. I’m try to give you MORE money and it’s like pulling teeth. They’re my only option with Gitlab’s insane price increase.
Many companies already pay for Google Workspace so Google Drive is included.
And for personal use, it's much cheaper than Dropbox.
I pay R$6.99/month for 100GB of Google storage (most of which is used by Google Photos), while Dropbox costs R$10/month for 50GB of storage and doesn't integrate very well with Google Photos.
Not to be glib, but this episode is a little reminder of why that's not always the case. Priceless data now lost (if it is in fact conclusively/irreoverably lost) demonstrates that sometimes in life, its the free or cheap things that end up costing us the most :(
Wait, GitHub doesn’t respond to support requests any more?
I’ve contacted them many times in the past (before MS acquisition), and every time I got a non-template response from a human being within a few hours, sometimes within half an hour. Example request: pushed something I later regretted, asked them to gc on the server and purge cached pages; I asked this a couple of times and had it promptly taken care of each time.
In the past GitHub had a specific forum that worked outside of GitHub itself, and at that forum it wasn't hard to get attention from actual GitHub employees, but since they transitioned to the generic Discussion in the feedback repository, closing the old forums, it's got to the new state of things where it's impossible to talk with people from there.
I had the opposite experience. Github only recognised my institutions student e-mail domain, not our institutional one that instructors and staff use. So I couldn't sign up as an instructor for the educational stuff.
I sent in a tech support request, and it was solved in less than 2 hours. They even replied, telling me they added my institutional e-mail domain.
So not only did a human reply and fix my problem, I'm not even a paying customer. I get the free education account.
I tried to contact Github for a GDPR complaint, and received only an automated message. If they don't respond in a month then I get the legal right to sue them, but it will have to get in line behind AWS.
The unspoken secret here is that ads distort markets, suck up resources, and thereby make economies less efficient. Banning them would be an economic boon.
I mostly agree with you, but I wonder if this view is a little simplistic.
Where a competitive marketplace exists I don't see ads (especially ads purchased by big incumbent vendors) adding any value: it would be better overall if competitors spent that money improving the product (or service) rather than trying to persuade customers to purchase a less-good product (measuring "good" as value/cost, since there is a place for lower quality but lower cost options).
But I do think there might be an economic argument in favour of at least some advertising to bring awareness of new market entrants, and especially of new categories of product/service. (One counterargument might be that this should properly be the role of journalists, and I agree that in an ideal world it would be. But the current dismal quality of the mainstream media suggests that economic incentives may actively hinder having ideal journalism…)
Ads could have a place on dedicated websites, where people go to learn about products. So we see ads only when we want to, and not whenever the company wants to distract us which is basically always.
If this means people see fewer ads, then that's a great way to reduce over-consumption.
> But I do think there might be an economic argument in favour of at least some advertising to bring awareness of new market entrants, and especially of new categories of product/service.
That's the standard argument made: Consumers learn about new products through advertising.
In fact, this is not what happens. At least I've virtually never seen it. The most effective ways to learn about new products are things like trade journals (including ones like Hacker News), blogs, etc. In those contexts, writers select for products which are interesting or which work well.
To the contrary, advertising strongly favors entrenched players with money:
- If Microsoft builds a SaaS, you build a better SaaS, but you have $50k to advertise, and Microsoft has $500M, there will be a gap in consumer perception, in favor of the inferior player.
- If I know, from advertising, that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, and Microsoft has additional generic brand recognition, you're at an even greater disadvantage.
In practice, advertising almost always favors entrenched players over new market entrants. Perhaps there's an exception to new market entrants from big players, but that's not nearly enough to justify the economic cost.
I've thought about the second problem a lot, and banning ads would solve both ends of the problem. Journalism is in a poor state because of the attention economy, which is to say: because of ads.
Although I'm not in favour of completely banning advertisements, just taxing advertising revenue heavily, as it sidesteps any censorship accusations. The government still lets you say what you want, but you can't become wealthy just by shilling for corpos.
Exceptions will be made in the name of encouraging viable consumer evaluation content, such as review copies, listing fees and suchlike as long as they are clearly stated and meet a stringent set of requirements.
With very rare exceptions (e.g. nuclear weapons), taxation is almost always a better mechanism than outright bans.
Even for pretty bad things (e.g. really toxic pollution), the taxes just need to be set obnoxiously high. By "obnoxiously high," I mean the trade-off might be cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch or removing a billion tons of CO2; something which clearly helps more than the harm done.
For mild things (e.g. device shitification or not having service manuals), even very modest taxes can help (e.g. a few pennies per device), without throttling innovation. In a commodity market of Chinese off-brands, a few pennies is enough to make-or-break a vendor.
At first glance, ads seem a win-win payment model for never-seen-before services: people trade something they're generally unaware of (their attention) for something they weren't aware they wanted or needed. Then you realize their attention is literally the stuff of their conscious lives, the most valuable thing they have.
And then you realize that you pay twice for the ads: once with your attention, and then again when you buy the product (the cost of which includes the advertising costs).
And then you realize that we're over-consuming, and the planet would be in a much healthier state if ads didn't exist as they do now.
It's frankly infuriating when you get generic responses from someone who has no internal systems access, means to address the problem, or ability to escalate to an engineer.
Often these purported super users reply with silly generic suggestions, or meaningless requests for information. There's nothing worse than posting highly specific debugging information to a forum, which is not read by engineers, and is instead replied to by someone suggesting you try logging out and in again.
For example, in this thread, "Device", "Drive for desktop version", and "Sync mode" isn't remotely relevant to restoring user files. And the super user cannot do anything with that information. If that information is truly necessary, a Google engineer can post in the thread requesting it.
And they do it all for a meaningless diamond badge. You may as well have AI doing it.
I think that's because Google teams are failing to engage properly with the community volunteers. When I was at Cloudflare I engaged directly with the external community moderators on Discord and made sure they felt comfortable DM'ing me or mentioning me if they wanted to escalate a thread to my attention (this is separate from them having formal community manager contact points which I'm sure Google does). Google engineers just don't care & there's no incentive structure at Google to improve things + Google management probably views this as "these people aren't paying us enough & engineering time is expensive". My counter here is that I viewed the entire class of non enterprise customers (free tier or tiny customers not paying for support) as a whole class that's 1 enterprise customer in aggregate. Yes it costs some money, but in practice not that much & there's non-monetary value you can extract doing that that offsets that cost.
That being said, I understand what the Google Drive team is going through here & as long as they are aware, the support threads aren't going to be useful until they root cause the issue & hopefully fix what happened.
It’s so frustrating when you Google your problem and you read some Google or Apple or Microsoft product support page and see people like this responding. They absolutely never have the solution and it will still be marked as problem solved.
The worst are the Apple forums where some ding a ling will chastise the person with the question for some supposed failure to follow whatever Apple wants you to do.
I didn’t want to say it…but yes. Every time I google something like that I end up on some Apple page with the borg asking “Well why would you want to do that?” to something completely obvious that people should be able to do.
Gathering data so when some PM wants to empire build and justify a project, or when a UX researcher person needs evidence to support their initiatives. All of this is self-serving towards their careers.
> In some ways, it’s nice for there to be a responsive community, but in other ways, I think a trillion dollar company should pay for excellent customer service.
Not sure how much you're following financial news these days, but trillion dollar companies are getting outright massacred on Wall Street if they dare spend money on things deemed "unnecessary" by the bankers.
Customer support organizations were the ones most targeted and hit by layoffs across the board to cut costs. After all, Google products are still being used after they fired large amount of support staff (not that support experience was good with them). It's a good example for other corporations to do the same - it's not like you'll go elsewhere, riiiight? Time to "cut the fat" (term I've seen on HN).
(And that doesn't include internal pressures in these corporations to avoid unpromoteable, unsexy, expensive and boring work of supporting customers.)
For most popular consumer products, there will be expert users who want to help. Official forums are a great way to engage those experts. Otherwise the experts will just start their own forums (and often do) e.g. forums for cars / mechanical issues.
Should Google be paying more to provide customer service? Absolutely! But it’s just not in Google’s culture to do customer service. Google likes to develop products with extremely lean / efficient burn rates. Googlers value efficiency orders of magnitude more than human connection.
That last line is true. If it’s ok with you, I will print it, frame it and place it in my office so next time the GCP Sales Rep comes begging for a share of our cloud presence I can tell him to thank Mr Pichar for their 4th place.
Worst “customer service” I’ve ever had with Google is with their Google Cloud FDEs and PMs. The best strategy is to use Google Cloud as leverage to re-negotiate AWS or Azure bills or use free gcloud credits and then don’t sign. Don’t ignore them, treat them as they treat you.
"In some ways, it's nice for there to be a responsive community, but in other ways, I think a trillion dollar company should pay for excellent customer service."
Surely the company must provide customer service for advertisers. Perhaps it's excellent.
Not sure that people using Google Drive for free are customers. They are potential ad targets and potential sources of data useful for an online ad services business, though.
> Surely the company must provide customer service for advertisers. Perhaps it's excellent.
Not really. Google is a monopoly with a huge moat, so pretty much everything they do is pretty shit. (But yeah, for actual Google customers there's actually some sort of customer support.)
It would probably be worth paying/staffing whatever though since people may do something for free, but it may not be enough to make a happy end user.
Not all companies miss this, Amazon has strict SLAs on responding to user requests, and this even includes GitHub issues. Personally, I find it rare, though not non-existent, to have a good experience with Google customer support or OSS while Amazon generally feels pretty good. Maybe just lucky of course but the brand effect is obvious to me and perhaps worth the companies spending a bit on.
E.g. in this case their volunteer customer service is left with this and there is no way to even know if Google sees this:
“Sorry Yeonjoong,
As a group of volunteers, we do not have access to user accounts and can only help by sharing our experiences. In this case there is nothing we can do. “