[bryanrasmussen]

>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology

It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.

[tmpz22]

Imagine being plucked from college at 22 and getting payed 200k+ total compensation with an introduction telling you how you're now one of the best at your field working with the smartest people in the world... how you're changing the world before you've even been on-boarded.

[asdff]

It's like being told you are heir to the throne, and many engineers carry that same princely arrogance obliviously. At least doctors and lawyers have gone through a second gauntlet after acing school to temper this somewhat. Those fields might not even start making good money until you are years above the entry level, even with a pricey professional degree.

[Nasrudith]

I would argue a second gauntlet only makes matters worse not better for "arrogance".

[asdff]

Maybe in the past where these professional degrees guaranteed highly compensated positions, but that's not the case now that these fields are saturated. A medical school grad still has a painful and overworked road to travel before they start making serious money and overcome their medical school debt. Similarly, if you are in a law school that isn't in the top 10, or you are not in the top 10 of your class, drop out while you can because you are looking at a career of terrible pay and insurmountable debt.

These sorts of gauntlets are much more life or death than a CSE program, where you are guaranteed at least a decent paying job if you make ok grades. On the other hand, pressure of not even knowing how many years before you can pay down your 300k+ professional school debt and start your life hanging over your head humbles you fast, compared to someone who turns in their capstone project and walks into 200k/yr.

[bryanrasmussen]

I think I was a pretty cynical bastard at 22 so I would actually have thought they were full of it.

[sli]

Sometimes there's a very fine line between cynicism and realism.

[WarOnPrivacy]

That line is the size of a Venn Diagram intersection.

[throwaway_1299]

As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money).

My back of napkin math from another comment:

I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.

One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.

So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.

Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.

So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.

[grahamburger]

> Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use.

Meaning that if someone uses 4 Google products they are contacting Google support on average once a quarter? That seems really high. I would have guessed at most a tenth of that.

[throwaway_1299]

I was averaging it out assuming there will be an overhead of users using the channel for many other reasons too, eg. they dont know how something works, there are language barriers, other errors get attributed to google (eg. android vs manufacturer) etc.

But this is a fair point, all the assumptions I make (eg. how many products a user uses, number of requests for support, etc.) are hypothetical and might be incorrect if this was actually implemented. Based on my judgement though, while variable might change, the end numbers will probably remain the same.

[donmcronald]

Is 3 mins a ticket realistic? That seems super low for anything that isn't dead simple.

I think the old internet was a lot better because the ratio of moderators to users was much, much higher and the moderators tended to be well informed enthusiasts that were usually running the site and had the ability / authority to fix anything / everything.

The easy solution to me is just add money. Let me pay on-demand for support. I've had a GSuite account for ages and never needed help with anything, but if my account got locked and I needed to talk to a human with the ability / authority to unlock it I wouldn't hesitate to pay $50-$100.

IMO part of the problem at Google is likely years and years of bragging instead of building and the tooling is probably absolute garbage to the point that a human wouldn't make a difference. That's why I say 3 mins seems low. I bet there are a lot of things that a human couldn't fix even if they wanted to.

It's pure speculation, but makes sense to me.

[luckylion]

I believe your guess for frequency is off by a lot, my guess would be more in the vicinity of a tenth of those assumption.

However, more importantly: going in with a "we need to support this" mindset alters incentives. Suddenly, useless error messages and lacking documentation aren't okay any more.

A different approach to solve the issue, if it even exists at that scale: make them pay for it. If you want service, pay $10. That's more than enough cover Google's cost and it's cheap for anyone that really requires service because e.g. their account has been locked, or Google's systems have disabled ads on their site. At the same time, it's expensive enough that you don't get flooded with "why do you show me those videos on the front page?" requests.

[throwaway_1299]

2/3/4 billion users paying $10 a year would certainly change things. I think the closest I have seen is the Google one program but not sure if people are aware or would want to pay for it.

For power users, I completely agree it might be the only feasible idea.

The closest parallel I can think of Amazon where there is cost of products involved (and >> $10 year I suspect) - they do a good job but even they work hard to make sure you cant easily reach a person.

[thewebcount]

I don't think they need a human to handle every single case you mention above. If advertisers had specific actionable steps to take when there's a problem and a way to say, "We've done those things," (and I'm sure Google can automate checking that they actually have), "and it's still not working," they probably wouldn't need to have as many humans working on this as you're saying above.

A lot of the problem is that when Google screws up, there's no recourse. We don't hear much about when Google gets it right because those people's problems were solved. Surely some significant portion of the incidents you mentioned above fall into that category.

[paulryanrogers]

My guess is the vague responses, or no response at all, is because scammers will game the system using any information they disclose.

One would hope transparent, clear rules and enforcement would prevail. But ambiguity and silence are far less expensive.

[madacoo]

Providing tech support by responding to customers is a different beast entirely to content moderation, however. It may be the case that human oversight of algorithmic moderation is also unreasonable, but I find this fairly unlikely. I wouldn't expect it would require quite so many man hours. But again, could be wrong.

[novok]

A possible solution would be to charge for support for people who get paid by you, although it probably creates a whole host of other problems too that would be difficult to balance. Also competition so those same people have someone else to go to.

[CydeWeys]

> That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day *

What happened to the math here? I'm not following this step?

[nraynaud]

does that means that we have to throw the baby with the bathwater and just forbid any company from being this big, because they could not possibly add value to the world in general past a certain scale?

[ngold]

Yes google should have as many people working for it as the advertising industry that it savaged. It should at least have customer service. You know a phone number you call to talk to someone.

These apologies to mega corporate is very sad. I am disappointed in you.

[Nasrudith]

That seems a bit ironic of an accusation given all of the people who don't do even back of the envelope math about what their demands for scaling would cost to try to do manually. Isn't that like saying plumbers are arrogantly obsessed with imprisoning water using pipes instead of free flowing streams of water while not considering the evaporation and contamination of said approach?

Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus.

It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.

[megous]

Techdirt doesn't sound like a small website, so presumably it generates quite some money for Google.

How hard it is to gate algorithmic decision making by (sum_of_ad_money_from_customer(x) > SOME_AMOUNT) goto human_review;

[alasdair_]

Or even just have a “pay us $150 for a month’s support” option.