The Google "support" black hole even exists for their high budget ad customers. I've seen a case where things went into the Google support black hole for a company spending a few million per month via DV360 / Google Ads. Nothing anyone could do about it, campaign blocked, work with "support" to fix it.
Any tier of Google Support is 100% a black hole. I had an extremely unusual issue with a service in Google Cloud, tried to debug it and failed. I filed a ticket and waited because P1 was only for “production” issues, but our issue was for development.
A few days later, the Google engineer assigned notes to us that we can escalate to P1 if this is blocking our workflow, even when not in production. I take this to my manager and they agree that it’s time to move it to P1.
We move it to P1 and immediately get traction, only to be stonewalled by a support engineer confidently asserting that the code throwing the error, which only existed in a private Google-maintained container, which only interfaced with our app through launching a cloud job through their platform, was actually our responsibility.
No joke, they actually said “As stated in my prior message, this issue is due to your code”, despite our code being a thin wrapper around their demonstration code to run it from the command line.
In my most business professional tone, I tell them off for lying to us about them debugging on their end and inform them that I will be immediately escalating because of this dissatisfactory response. This finally gets the ticket moving and a few weeks later, a bug fixed version of the entire platform is deployed.
Total time from start to finish:
- P2: 2.5 weeks of daily updates
- P1, until we’re told that it’s our fault: 8 hours
- P1 escalated until issue was completely fixed: 5 weeks
We paid for premium support. I cannot imagine how bad free support is.
Have the same experience with Microsoft support. The difference is the timeline is much shorter and when our issues don't get any traction our rep intervenes and escalates to engineers.
I understand that level-1 support for these orgs are basically documentation librarians. Cool. We pay an incredible amount for premium support, but whatever. It's fine. What matters is that we have a rep that is engaged and cares about us being unblocked and isn't going to let us flounder for issues their support team is not going to solve. Have never seen this level of commitment from Google.
And as much as I dislike Amazon and the juggernaut of AWS, this is how they win me over.
It's rarely a complete black hole, and I have spoken to product engineers and owners for multiple lines.
When we filled ours out for a CRM they wanted a video of the CRM. So we showed them a video (from dev with fake data). We appealed the process explaining that Mickey Mouse is a not a real person. They rejected that appeal. So after going back and forth for a week or two we uploaded a video with basically everything but the navmenu blurred out and they finally approved it.
The entire process was awful.
Just another reason to not deal with Google. Eventually, gravity is going to catch up with them, and they will never recover, because their business culture is shit. Zero interest or focus on the customers.
The process is the punishment
That's a diamond of a quote; are you a student of Kafka's?
It's from the eponymous 1979 book by Malcolm Feeley and may predate it