Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

Electrical inspections can be very much that way.

"This isn't up to code, I'm not signing off on it."

"How is it not up to code?"

"Your electrician knows. Or you can look in the electrical code."

Your electrician doesn't know; no other inspector has ever objected to the way they've done things.

That electrical code is paywalled, despite being official government policy (written and published by a trade association, which regularly updates said code mostly to force people to keep re-buying their volumes.)

Own your platform from the bottom to the top. If your business model requires you to rely on one of these companies, pivot.

We have lost. They have won. They can deplatform anyone for anything or for nothing. Your continued use of the platform depends on whether or not you make them money. You are entitled to nothing they have built. They are not providing public services or utilities.

Abandon them, or on your own head be it when, not if, you get fucked.

If possible, stay off the U.S. Dollar.

I feel vaguely sorry that people have to do these jobs where they are set up to be harrangued. However, I sincerely hope they are at least prepared for it.

A normal person, including Anthony, would say something like:

Sorry, I'm working with an automated system which doesn't provide me with any more information, and cannot obtain any more help from my organization; even though I may appear to be an insider, in a real sense I am an 'employed outsider'.

I have no contact information for escalating these kinds of problems, nothing. Let me put this in the clearest possible terms: even if I wrote an application myself which got rejected, and if I by dumb luck I were assigned to my own support case, I would not be able to help myself. Get it? The best I would be able to do is perhaps randomly change the application or rewrite it and hope that the new one sticks.

Someone obviously knows the machinery, and why it rejects certain applications, but I'm not allowed to know who that is. And it's not even clear they would do anything about it.

What I'm saying is effectively that I could perform this support job to its full extent if I were sitting over there with you, looking over your shoulder, relying on what you have on your screen.

In short, I am completely useless to you, in this matter. I am here to answer the dumb questions that smart people people like you can resolve by themselves, for the sake of that minority who aren't able to. Think of me like someone who CAN google, rather than someone AT Google.

In addition to that, I can do stunningly realistic impressions. If we go to voice chat, I will introduce you to Putin!

The closest Anthony came to the above was admitting that the repeated material was all the information that was given to him.

This means basically one thing; Anthony was trained to push back on these requests and just use the provided information, and also trained not to talk about the circumstances of his support work in any personal way.

That job is acceptable to Anthony and so there he is; whether that means it sucks to be Anthony is hard to say. Maybe it's better than jobs he had before and he's happy for now. Maybe Anthony is able to help a good fraction of the cases, and feels good about that.

The doctors, lawyers, actors, musicians, and other professions have guilds like this. What makes them work is that there is a limited supply of available experts in the field, and a desire to raise their bargaining power.