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Google Intrusion Detection Problems

fredtrotter.com

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Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#101

Post by x0x0 »

Lewisham wrote: post #62
1_2__3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound disrespectful, and very much appreciate your posting. But realize that the audience here has seen the OP's story play out with Google's products over and over again. This is clearly a systemic issue with how Google handles support, and claiming "fell short this time" is more than a little disingenuous. (I also get 'man bites dog' will also get more traction than the inverse, but regardless - thi…

FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general. My interactions with Cloud Support on the other side of the fence has led me to believe they are very committed and working very hard. Yes, you have to pay for it. But once you do, regardless of the tier of support, I've seen them work tirelessly and escalate tickets to engineering quickly (order hours, not days) if they couldn't figure it out. I'm looking at th…

Nobody cares how hard you or your coworkers work. Results matter, nothing else.

Given the story so far, you offer adwords style customer service (we don't give a damn about you) while attempting to catch up from position 3 behind aws and azure in the paas race. Complete with automated emails with outdated documentation and no human anywhere without a social media outcry. I'm sure stories like this are damaging (seriously, just use aws), and there will be some postmortem damage control, but unless I see a human support sla for situations like this, I can't see why anyone would risk their business on you.

Seriously, a fix it or we shut you down email for reasons you won't share with an 2 business day response. Of course, you're issuing a 3 day warning, so if that fell on a Friday, you would be dark before anyone bothered to look at the support ticket (3 days expire Monday, 2 biz days Tuesday evening). Amazing.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#102

Post by martinald »

We got the 100k credit which is nice. Noticed the actual technical side is excellent - vastly better than azure and AWS (AWS especially - I find the whole UI and way it works so clunky).

However, despite using our credit to buy gold support when it came to using it I couldn't work their tickets UI at all. Turns out you need to change products from your Google apps support to cloud platform by some tiny link which is not at all obvious.

I had to phone up and it was obvious people hit it all the time as the operator instantly knew what the issue was.

Also related: azure by default didnt renew your free trial despite an active cc being on file. It just shuts everything off with no obvious warning. What other service does that?

Honestly think these companies need to do some proper usability testing on their flows because there is so much clunky weirdness in cloud providers right now.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#103

Post by blakeyrat »

jwatte wrote: post #27
blakeyrat wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

Maybe Google needs to have fewer robots involved and more human beings?

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#104

Post by blakeyrat »

pellej_s wrote: post #14

So, everyone's basically saying: > Google sucks > Don't rely on Google if you want your business to succeed > This is old news! Happens all the time > Google = SPoF ...you're all looking like trolls to me. Please, do tell how Spotify manages to service 60+ markets with some core pieces of infrastructure on Google's Cloud offerings.

Same way Pewdiepie gets excellent YouTube customer service: he has millions invested in Google properties. Google's great at helping their huge money-makers, it's the literally everybody else who gets screwed by their awful robot systems.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#105

Post by blakeyrat »

zippy786 wrote: post #84

Google, said to have very high hiring bar, yet I've seen more than a few times now that their product lines are sub-par. I'm sure the explanation they give is that we are very big and we can ignore the 1% corner cases and have the mentality that "we are so big we don't really care about smaller parts of the internet". Also, the hypocrisy in using very logical questions to hire people but not sticking to similar logic…

It feels like they have an entire company of Mr. Spocks without a single Doctor McCoy to round things out.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#106

Post by blakeyrat »

ben_jones wrote: post #28
tscanausa wrote: post #22

My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance

Personally I really value comments like this and therefore feel the need to point out that the statement "Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety." seems like a bullet point for a status meeting and likely does not convey the desired effect of such a post: to have a somewhat personal response from a normally faceless company.

If people wanted their anxiety reduced, they'd sign up for a guided meditation group.

People want their accounts reactivated.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#107

Post by jwatte »

bpicolo wrote: post #56
sargun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EC2 instances are meant to be ephemeral.

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.

No, I'm pretty sure this has always been the case. Some early adopters lost data when it was on local volumes and not backed up, and everybody who paid attention learned from the public post mortems.

Separately, even hardware you own and operate is ephemeral. You never know when the disk, PSU, or cooling fan will kick the bucket and the host wedges one way or another.

If you want the illusion of permanence, VMWare had a solution for you ... for a price you're not gonna like!

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#108

Post by bigiain »

ufmace wrote: post #90
tscanausa wrote: post #22

My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance

Thanks for your help and for responding here, but I hope you guys at Google know that this seems like a major organization-level problem. There's a big perception that Google has no real customer support for anything, even if there's pretty serious amounts of money involved, fueled by a regular drumbeat of blog posts about people who had their entire livelihood shut down for unexplained reasons with no possible recou…

Even the phrase "Reduce Customer Anxiety" would increase my anxiety if I were a customer (and steels my resolve not to become one of their "acceptably-anxious customers").

"Reduce", not "remove" - it's stinks of implying there's an acceptable level of "customer anxiety" that their platform should generate, and someone's set some easily-measurable metrics and a bunch of people's KPIs - and those people are now all working out how to game the metrics instead of solve the problems. "Hey, my bonus depends on reducing the clicks on the "Request an appeal" button. What's the easiest way to meet that goal? I _could_ start handling customer service in a professional and sympathetic way - but that's not "The Google Way". I know, I'll just move the button to a different place this quarter, rename it next quarter, and remove it all together before the end of the year."

Sorry Google-people - I know you all don't think you're doing evil, but there'a a hell of a reputation you got to overcome on the "Google just doesn't do customer service" issue.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#109

Post by chinhodado »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #96
spacehunt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to believe you, but every Google service has been like this for years. Like Play Store for example. It will take way more to show you guys really are reviewing similar incidents and, more importantly, to actually act on your reviews and improve your processes.

This is absolute BS. I've had nothing but stellar support from the Play store and you can easily contact them via chat, email or even voice.

Just because you have not experienced it doesn't mean it is BS. There are countless horror stories out there about people getting their apps removed by an automated process, receiving templated emails with ambiguous reasons for the removal that is impossible to pinpoint the exact cause, and having no way to contact any real person to ask about it.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#110

Post by bigiain »

paradox95 wrote: post #71

Once had Google kill a Spark job after it was running for about 12 hours because they thought we were doing something nefarious. It cost us thousands of dollars in wasted time and Google spend because their automated system made a mistake. They never attempted to fix it, refund us or even seem concerned.

And you compare that to the many stories you hear about Amazon waiving invoices when people inadvertently ran up multi thousand dollar AWS bills by accident or when credentials were exposed. (Happened to an ex-colleague of mine years back - AWS creds committed to a public git repo - minutes later there's like 40 10xlarge or g2.8xlarge or whatever instances mining bitcoin. First thing he knew about it was Amazon ringing him up saying "this $10,000 spike in your typical use, that's not really you, right?" and shutting it all down for him and reversing the charge...)

Then you consider this when you decide whether to base the next big business decision on an AWS or Google Cloud platform…

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