[abeisgreat]

One of the things we fought for, for years after acquisition was to maintain a qualified staff of fulltime, highly paid support people who are capable of identifying and escalating issues like this with common sense.

This is a battle we slowly lost. It started with all of support being the original team, then went to 3-4 fulltime staff plus some contracts, to entirely contractors (as far as I’m aware).

This was a big sticking point for me. I told them I did not believe we should outsource support, but they did not believe we should have support for developer products at all, so I lost to that “compromise.” After that I volunteered myself to do the training of the support teams, which involved traveling to Manila, Japan and Mexico regularly. This did help but like support as whole, it was a losing battle and quality has declined over time.

Your experience is definitely expected and perhaps even by design. Sadly this is true across Google, if you want help you’d best know a Googler.

[GuB-42]

I suspect it is going to end up being Google's downfall, or at least, be part of it.

They simply don't know humans. Their repeated failures at building social networks is good enough evidence. They always try to have the human out of the loop, which, to be fair, worked for them in the early days, as their search engine was better than those that relied on human-made directories. But now it is becoming ridiculous. It is a company of bots, for bots. And when they need humans for some reason, they take away most of the value they can add with rigid frameworks, basically treating them like bots. They pay hundreds of thousands not for people who are competent and trustworthy to provide the best service, but instead, to people who write bots to provide mediocre service.

I believe that at some point, a startup who understand humans will eat them up, bit by bit, by feeding on dissatisfied customers who don't want to deal with stupid bots.

[xyzeva]

I really doubt that this will be google's downfall, theyre too big to fall right now. I think it will be laws.

[zackmorris]

Thank you, and good job for isolating the root cause and solution.

Deregulation is an op designed to prevent the people from toppling dragons.

[withinboredom]

The bigger they are, the harder they fall; is a saying for a reason. There is no such thing as “too big to fail” otherwise the East India Trading Company would still be in operation.

[sillyfluke]

Sometimes. IBM was still considered big when Buffet invested in them early in the 2010s. And it took almost a decade worth of bad performance for him to finally exit. It might be slowly sliding into irrevelance but its stock hasn't completely tanked -- during or after that period.

[andybak]

> they did not believe we should have support for developer products at all

That explains a lot.

[xyzeva]

What'd you expect, its google!