181–190 of 238 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit disingenuous. It's also quite easy to take cheap potshots behind the anonymity of pseudonyms. The customer has unfortunately left zero details with which to contact them - my details are on HN, anybody is free to PM me, and I'm happy to see what I can do internally.
Zero details? Surely you have his email? How else is the Google support person he's talking to able to reply to him?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zero details? Surely you have his email? How else is the Google support person he's talking to able to reply to him?
I think he means "on that list", not in actual comms with google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that it's not as easy to solve as a naive first pass would assume. Because Google doesn't have the resources to tackle challenging problems? lol. A difficult to solve problem on its own is one thing, but the comically awful support Google offers indicates that it's more likely a "we don't care" versus a "we don't know how" problem.
We don't have a monopoly on clever CS people =). I'm pretty sure Dropbox and Box.net have lots of smart people working for them as well. (In fact, I have friends at Dropbox) I'm not an expert in that specific bug, so I won't speculate publicly - but the memory issue is something that has seen steady commits over time from various people who are plugging away diligently at it. It's a bit of a moving target, and there…
What possible reasons could there be for your support team denying the refund that may have been left off that page? Hypothetically speaking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're reading HN you probably don't need that level of support, but that's not to say there aren't customers who need their hand held to restart a computer. Part of the issue is that support is never allowed to push back on the customer. They don't get to say "I'm sorry, but you'll have to do a rudimentary computing course before I can proceed further". In a business environment it's all to easy to save on trai…
There really isn't a polite way to say "Do you have anyone competent in your office you could maybe ask first?"
There's the (probably apocryphal) story of WordPerfect (huh, what's that?) support. It ends with:
SERVICE: "Tell them you're too fucking stupid to own a computer."
http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/misc/wordperfect_...
Google has the WORSE support I've ever experienced as a (former) PAYING corporate customer of theirs. I completely distrust ANYTHING they tell me and would NEVER again be caught paying for anything coming from them. Never again.
I can't imagine myself paying for any google services. Besides. They already have my secrets, I'm keeping the money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
That's exactly what I thought the second I read this: We would be needing further informations It sounds uncannily as if Google has offshored service on Google Drive.
In Wrocław (Poland) we have a Google office. From water cooler talk I heard that it's mostly support.
From another source I heard about support calls where one side eventually figured out the accent and suggested moving from English to Polish ;).
Plural for information is valid in Polish and probably other Slavic languages (s. "informacja", p. "informacje"). A lot of Poles do a 1-1 translation when learning and it just sticks in their vocabulary (should work most of the time as Polish has a sizable subset of words with Germanic roots.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are forgetting about monitoring for changed files to resync those quickly.
Get notification of file change, binary search the list of files, make adjustments. This can also be done on a small amount of memory, independent of file count. I'm sure it's tricky to update the existing software, but as a generic problem syncing files with O(1) or O(logn) memory is not very hard.
(I've been very slowly designing my own, and the first thing for me was coming up with a list of awkward cases ..)
Wow, 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because engineers are expensive, engineers that can talk to customers are even more expensive and decent engineers willing to do support are even more expensive. That said, I do think software devs should be more involved with the customer for other reasons, far to often they are building software without having any idea what the customers workflow is.
The same reason forcing devs to do ops on their own product justifies having devs do (some of) their own customer support. Otherwise they just toss any old crap over the fence and it becomes somebody elses' problem. Force them to solve those problems and they magically go away, cos devs hate support.