From an outsider/user perspective I feel like Google's internal philosophy is more algned with "keeping the algorithm happy" rather than deal with any single customer on an individual basis.
It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
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Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#42That's comical. I feel like I have an understanding of what's going on because I've been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google.
I was told - "there's a backlog of support requests. They are old requests that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can't handle. Being an expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I said "OK, but let me be very clear that this is secondary to all other work that I'm doing."
Then they proceeded to hand over tickets. I wasn't allowed to communicate directly to customers, and communicating with their offshore staff was a challenge. "I need a log to even begin to troubleshoot this." followed by a frustrated customer reporting "I don't know why you're asking for this log, it won't help." OK, I have to be more clear with support, who I assumed would know. "I need this log. You create it by taking these steps." Another follow up from the customer with the same log again, reporting more frustration. Repeat this process 5 or 6 times, on 20 different tickets. I finally follow up along a different path. "Well, you see they see a request for logs and they only have one template to ask for logs. I'll get it straightened out." A month goes by. I'm getting requests for updates. I follow up on every path I have available. One customer was smart enough to get me the right logs, but they did not forward that log on. After much back and forth I ended up getting that one log. It pointed to a source code problem that I had no access to view, let alone edit. And of course, I have no contact to send this to.
What I ended up doing is submitting a bug report, the proper logs, and a summary of the logic problem in the source through one of my clients support account. Then I updated the tickets that looked to be related with "pending outcome of support ticket 1234. Months later, that particular problem was patched.
Hopefully the customers with their tickets stuck in "level 3 support" were eventually notified. I backed out of that project at some point because it just wasn't a good use of my time.
I understand the need to find a way to scale support. But if you are going to scale, monitor for effectiveness, plan for procedural changes, and do something to make sure the communications channels are working.
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#43This is why Dropbox has value. It works, its reliable, and if you're a paying customer you can get support. Spend the $10/month. Don't go on for more than half a year with your storage being broken. Disclaimer: no affiliation except a satisfied pro account user EDIT: Edge cases notwithstanding.
I've never had any problems with Dropbox either, but the OP's problem with Google Drive is also an edge case.
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#44My guess is that engineering resources have been focused on the upcoming new version of drive, and are ignoring difficult bugs with the current version. I could understand that in a smaller company, but seems poor at Google scale. OTOH, that scale also means they don't care about losing a few customers over something like this.
This shouldn't happen. There's things called End-of-Life and End-of-Service. EOS usually happens a least a year out. Google should still be servicing previous versions.
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#45That's comical. I feel like I have an understanding of what's going on because I've been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google. I was told - "there's a backlog of support requests. They are old requests that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can't handle. Being an expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I said "OK, but let me be very clear that this is seco…
"scaling support" almost always seems hand in hand with "dumbing down for lowest common denominator". By the time things have made it through "please restart your computer"-level stuff, maybe the only way to scale is to put real engineers on problems and "allow" them to actually talk to the people having the problems. This approach seems to be the only one companies seem hell-bent on never trying.
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#46It's so annoying that I can't use the arrow keys to scroll. Only Page Up/Down or the mouse.
Ctrl-F has also been overridden with a custom implementation that hides most of the text.
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#47Wow, that's enraging and really bad, even for a company as... unique in its approach to customer support as Google. I really hope someone on Drive is reading this and can escalate, but it's really bad that it takes a highly voted post on Hacker News to get some kind of resolution. Even "it's too expensive to fix this, here are your files and a refund from when it started breaking" would be infinitely better than this…
Automated support heard your complaint, automated support don't care.
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#48It's been six months, eight days, twelve hours
Since you went away
I miss you so much and I don't know what to say
I should be over you
I should know better but it's just not the case
It's been six months, eight days, twelve hours
Since you went away
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#49Thanks for sharing the story. Looking back, I realize that I had noticed bugs filed months prior. I don't even know what they are about because I subconsciously avoid them. (perhaps out of fear?) Assuming that these are valid tickets (and not outdated), I subconsciously avoided tickets that are months old. Probably because: 1. Bugs that are months old are probably super complicated and will take up a good chunk of ti…
Depends on company culture. I would expect that a Googler would get into some trouble (at the very least step on some toes, though that might be warranted in this situation) if they basically cut out the team this particular bug was triaged to. Probably better to escalate internally and have the engineers actually responsible for fixing the bug have it made a higher priority.
And yet for the customer, it's so much better if the engineer contacts you and tells you they're actually working on your problem. This is why people love dealing with small businesses who don't have those layers of bureaucracy. "Wow, I'm actually talking to someone in a real conversation like a normal human being."
Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
#50> The Windows version of the product currently has difficulty syncing large numbers of files at once due to the memory constraints on 32-bit applications, even if your machine has a lot of memory. It sounds like they have two issues: * Access to the existing files * The money given to Google so far The first you can probably resolve by using the Linux client to download the files to an external hard drive. (edit) And…
Looks like the Mac client is failing, too:
> > Now GDrive is crashing consistently on my Mac.
> The second you can resolve 6 months back by issuing chargebacks. It may be polite to request a refund first, after downloading the files.
Seconding this; I've successfully gotten chargebacks in much less extreme cases.