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How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

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Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#51

Post by cowsandmilk »

wodenokoto wrote: post #31
pmelendez wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just personal but when I respond a question in SO I feel I am giving back to the community... This feels more like giving it to Google. Google already monetize their service by making me see ads(which is fair). SO monetize their service by showing me employment opportunities (which to me is better). Google model doesn't need the community to work... The entire SO model is a paying forward knowledge transfe…

But it is not different. They both show ads, and neither would make any money unless the ads had benefit to a significant amount of users. The only thing SO has done different is better branding towards top contributors, and judging from your post they've done it by targeting ads towards the top contributors.

> But it is not different.

Except it is. Most people aren't contributing answers on SO about how to use SO. They are contributing answers about how to use JS or C or PHP or how to solve a particular programming problem. SO did not create JS or C or PHP or any other programming language or framework discussed on SO. Google's program is to get people to support products Google created so that Google doesn't have to support its products itself.

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#52

Post by MichaelCrawford »

jakobegger wrote: post #16

This is what made me ditch Gmail. After using it for several years, I stumbled across a serious bug that removed all email from my inbox. I tried contacting support, but there was none; all I got were replies from top contributors pointing me to other people with the same issue. It becsme clear that there was no way to escalate the issue or get help from someone who could actually investigate the bug or help restorin…

this is why i regard it as a bad thing that no one pays out of picket for software anymore.

last resort from working software was only 9.95 but even so we had unlimited free tech support. that gave us a good reason to keep product quality high.

what we have now are confusing, poorly thought out user interface, code that crashes and no tech support.

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#53

Post by tracker1 »

ddingus wrote: post #46
rc4algorithm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pay with their privacy. Google's support is generally considered to be somewhere between dismal and nonexistent for most of its services. Clearly, they're making enough money to be doing better. No one expects intensive 24/7 support for free webmail, but Google's balance of profit and support is off. Free-tier users aren't cattle, especially not when you're tracking them.

Anyone who feels that value exchange isn't appropriate has a lot of options. If you pay Google, their support is much improved. I don't expect any support for free web mail. And yes, I back mine up, from time to time, or pay for that support. You may well value things differently, but that's not necessarily on Google.

How do I keep my @gmail.com address while paying for support? For that matter, where is the paid supported version of Google Voice / Hangouts?

I switched my texting/gv to hangouts on my phone, now I can't add someone that texts me to my contact list without trying to call them first. I also can't seem to SMS someone from hangouts in my contact list on my desktop without manually typing in their phone number. Pretty big UI/UX oversights (or not).

There's really no way to actually get in touch with appropriate googlers. There's no real evidence that product owners participate where the people actually are.

What might be better, would be to approach the StackExchange guys, or even just riff their interface for a google branded services site, and have actual google employees participate. I tend to see a lot of the same lacking regarding general Windows / Microsoft support, but SO/SE fill a lot of the void... I don't think I've really seen googlers participate. Maybe they should bring back that 20% time to participate in either these forums on SO, or GH issues.

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#54

Post by jeo1234 »

CurtMonash wrote: post #45

It's somewhat ironic to have a thread decrying unpaid community contributions appear on Hacker News (or any other forum).

Not really. Hacker News is not a profit center for YC. Last time I checked Google is running gmail in order to make money (nothing wrong with that). But if Google is getting paid it seems a little silly for people to give up their time and skills to Google and getting nothing (useful) in return.

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#55

Post by tracker1 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #30
Spivak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible that the support he received from others outweighed the time he put in supporting others. I know for sure that's the case for me.

In my experience, SO is only useful for trivial questions, or maybe questions that ask for a better explanation of some basic concept. If you have a question you can't find answer for by searching on the internet, it won't be answered on SO either. I still occasionally help people there, but it was never a useful resource to me personally.

For the most part I agree.. I do wish more people would simply do a search before asking some questions though... I see way too many lowball questions, and it's impossible to keep up with the hose/feed even on relatively narrow topics anymore.

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#56

Post by jeo1234 »

testingonprod wrote: post #4

Wow.....just wow. The "benefits of becoming a top contributor" video made me want to bash my head into a wall.

You could almost see them starting to think 'Oh shit. Someone is getting screwed here, and I'm pretty sure it's not Google.'

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#57

Post by tracker1 »

bbcbasic wrote: post #47
mlamat wrote: post #19

I wish we would get slavery back. At least they got some food.

Yeah it would be awesome, especially if we make the white people slaves, just to mix it up a bit.

I know this is heading OT, but there have been plenty of white slaves throughout history, even in the U.S. For that matter, look at how Chinese, Japanese and Irish immigrants were treated.

I also am not sure that having a class of people in this country that can't afford to raise a family on a single income while working 40+ hours a week is so much different than slavery.

In this case, I don't fault google for trying, I just think their approach is probably wrong, and you really don't see enough googlers (paid employees) respond to any of the threads you happen across.

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#58

Post by jschwartzi »

gk1 wrote: post #18

Reminds me of a SaaS company (I won't name) solved the problem of "too much support time wasted on non-enterprise clients" by funneling all non-enterprise support questions to a community forum and encouraging contributors to answer those questions. I answered dozens of questions for many days, thinking it will help build credibility (as suggested by another commenter). Then I realized I'm just volunteering as level…

There are semiconductor companies that do this with their software offerings. Their level 1 support always asks you if you've posted in their community forum.

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#59

Post by jakobegger »

sahaj wrote: post #20
jakobegger wrote: post #16

This is what made me ditch Gmail. After using it for several years, I stumbled across a serious bug that removed all email from my inbox. I tried contacting support, but there was none; all I got were replies from top contributors pointing me to other people with the same issue. It becsme clear that there was no way to escalate the issue or get help from someone who could actually investigate the bug or help restorin…

Do you have a link to your post outlining the issue?

Here, I found it: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/gmail/BQp...

I seemed to have misremembered: I only got a single reply from a top contributor. The links pointing to other people with the same issue may have been automatic (the website looked different when I originally posted the question)

Re: How to become an unpaid technical support worker for Google

#60

Post by _lce0 »

nabeelahmed13 wrote: post #50
shalmanese wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do what everyone else does: 1. Write a blog post about it 2. Get the blog post to the top of Hacker News 3. Get a bunch of people to tweet @Google because of it. 4. Have Google begrudgingly contact you and fix the problem. I don't know why you insist on making it so complicated.

Or: 1. Be Taylor Swift 2. Write blog post 3. Have the company publicly fix the issue for all users in one go.

(in a matter of hours)
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