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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

#211

Post by goldfire »

albedoa wrote: post #207
victorhooi wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In terms of the customer support side of things, I don't know all the specifics of what happened, so I won't comment further. However, my details are on HN, so feel free to PM if you want me to see what I can do internally. What possible information would you need? You are basically saying you don't trust OP's account of what happened.

In any kind of user-facing support role, not trusting the user's account of what happened is rule #1.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#212

Post by alikoneko »

ericd wrote: post #111
Lazare wrote: post #81

Google periodically flirts with the idea of being a consumer products company that provides products to consumers and then supports them. There is extensive evidence (of which this is just the latest element) that this is not a good idea, and won't be until there's a fundamental change.

I've found Google Fi to have exceptionally good support, and the same is true with Nexus phones - a very painless RMA process when something didn't work quite right.

I had to RMA 3 Nexus 6Ps. I'm not sure if it was bad luck or the 6P just had a bad build quality. The first one the backwards facing mic died causing it to be the world's most expensive text messaging device. The second had a battery issue that caused it to be a brick for about 2 days (this happened over New Years too). The third, bootloop.

The process is relatively painless, with the notable exception being the 2nd time my Nexus shat the bed. It is unreasonable to tell a person "You have to live without a phone for a week." when they rely on UBER/Lyft for work. I had to buy a $100 burner Android. I'm sort of hoping I have a problem with my Pixel. I accidentally chipped the screen at the gym, and it bothers me slightly.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#213

Post by Dylan16807 »

pjc50 wrote: post #188
Dylan16807 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where's your sync client then? (I've been very slowly designing my own, and the first thing for me was coming up with a list of awkward cases ..)

> Where's your sync client then?

I guess I was unclear here. It's hard to make a polished user application. The not-hard part is just the core algorithm selection. I have enough minutes in the day to consider algorithms, but not enough tens of hours to write suites of quality software products.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#214

Post by Dylan16807 »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #179
Dylan16807 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows' notification API gets an overflow (ERROR_NOTIFY_ENUM_DIR) if you change many files quickly, like during a copy/paste in explorer. You then have to re-scan the dir manually. While rescanning, the files may continue to change. You may or may not get a subsequent event for a file that changed during your rescan. One example of related issues: https://github.com/libuv/libuv/issues/626

I'm aware of how awful notification APIs can be, but that's a separate problem entirely from per-file memory use.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#215

Post by yebyen »

stephengillie wrote: post #22
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

Upvoting so someone at Google can look at this. I won't use a Google product if I can avoid it because their support is terrible and automated. At their scale I imagine any customer slight can be rounded off because of the sheer number of customers they have.

I use Google Fi for my phone service, because I can switch my single device and number to another carrier relatively quickly. I recommend my family and friends not use Google Fi, because of Google's reputation for randomly killing off services. I don't want to have to navigate numerous family and friends to another carrier on short notice, because an executive decided this side-project wasn't quite profitable enough…

I was actually waiting for someone to bring up Project Fi, because in my opinion it seems to be one of the Google services that breaks the mold, in fact I've had more than a handful of interactions with their Customer Service and I've always left satisfied or with my problem actually solved.

I really do hope they don't kill it, because I have recommended it to a number of people who have gone ahead and signed up for the service, and they're probably going to remember who recommended it after it goes away...

But at the same time it seems like it should have the be quite profitable, and I have more faith that it won't go away. There's only one service at Google that gets my cash dollars for $80-100/mo, and that's my Fi family plan with three lines.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#216

Post by emodendroket »

flukus wrote: post #118
wildrhythms wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the unfortunate truth is that "please restart your computer"-level stuff actually does solve whatever problem the customer is reporting enough that companies put value into that type of support. 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.

> 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…

> 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".

Well, no kidding, because who would pay for that?

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#217

Post by njpg »

victorhooi wrote: post #175
Rantenki wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer made a decision to use a particular storage platform due to the features that are advertised. One of those features is a desktop client. If the desktop client is failing, then he's not getting what is promised "on the box" (or in the feature set advertised on google.com). They sell that client pretty hard btw: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2490101?hl=en To use the full power of Google Drive, you sh…

That's a mis-framing of the situation. The issue isn't so much as the client is failing - but that it wasn't designed to handle their edge-case - and trying to sync 700,000+ items, or 700GB worth of files to your desktop is definitely at the edges. Other desktop sync clients (e.g. Box.net or Dropbox) exhibit similar performance characteristics - e.g. Dropbox advertise a limit of around 300,000 files ( https://www.dro…

seems like if there's a limit to the number of files the client can handle, the client should warn you as you're approaching that limit, and ideally block you from adding too many.

If the client allows you do do something, and you do it, and it causes the client to break, that is 100% a "failure"

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#218

Post by Jerry2 »

icebraining wrote: post #174
Jerry2 wrote: post #64

Why is this story being censored? Because it puts Google in negative light? We don't see much censorship when other companies are put into spotlight over horrendous customer service.

How is this story being censored?

It was penalized. It had hundred more upvotes than other stories and was younger too yet it was dropping fast.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#219

Post by make3 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #130
make3 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't you be using something like Amazon S3 at that scale?

S3 is expensive per byte, and your use of "that scale" confuses me for an amount that's only about 15% of a new hard drive.

I was more thinking about the quantity of files

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#220

Post by tomkarlo »

consz wrote: post #183
Mithaldu wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means "on that list", not in actual comms with google.

The person I'm replying to said he works on the Google Drive team, so I presume he also is able to get the actual comms between Google and the customer.

Not necessarily, at least easily. Customer comms often contain PII, so they're not just widely available to anyone interested due to privacy concerns. Unless you're on a ticket related to that specific customer's issue, it's very hard to get that info (and it should be.) Even then, PII like the email address may be obfuscated in the ticket.
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