<story><title>It&apos;s been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me</title><url>https://dynalist.io/d/wRIiJ0s0ONiB1w98ginB4g_n</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mgkimsal</author><text>&amp;quot;scaling support&amp;quot; almost always seems hand in hand with &amp;quot;dumbing down for lowest common denominator&amp;quot;.  By the time things have made it through &amp;quot;please restart your computer&amp;quot;-level stuff, maybe the only way to scale is to put real engineers on problems and &amp;quot;allow&amp;quot; them to actually talk to the people having the problems.  This approach seems to be the only one companies seem hell-bent on never trying.</text></item><item><author>Steeeve</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s comical.  I feel like I have an understanding of what&amp;#x27;s going on because I&amp;#x27;ve been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google.&lt;p&gt;I was told - &amp;quot;there&amp;#x27;s a backlog of support requests.  They are old requests that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can&amp;#x27;t handle.  Being an expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I said &amp;quot;OK, but let me be very clear that this is secondary to all other work that I&amp;#x27;m doing.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Then they proceeded to hand over tickets.  I wasn&amp;#x27;t allowed to communicate directly to customers, and communicating with their offshore staff was a challenge.  &amp;quot;I need a log to even begin to troubleshoot this.&amp;quot;  followed by a frustrated customer reporting &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t know why you&amp;#x27;re asking for this log, it won&amp;#x27;t help.&amp;quot;  OK, I have to be more clear with support, who I assumed would know.  &amp;quot;I need this log.  You create it by taking these steps.&amp;quot;  Another follow up from the customer with the same log again, reporting more frustration.  Repeat this process 5 or 6 times, on 20 different tickets.  I finally follow up along a different path.  &amp;quot;Well, you see they see a request for logs and they only have one template to ask for logs.  I&amp;#x27;ll get it straightened out.&amp;quot;  A month goes by.  I&amp;#x27;m getting requests for updates.  I follow up on every path I have available.  One customer was smart enough to get me the right logs, but they did not forward that log on.  After much back and forth I ended up getting that one log.  It pointed to a source code problem that I had no access to view, let alone edit.  And of course, I have no contact to send this to.&lt;p&gt;What I ended up doing is submitting a bug report, the proper logs, and a summary of the logic problem in the source through one of my clients support account.  Then I updated the tickets that looked to be related with &amp;quot;pending outcome of support ticket 1234.  Months later, that particular problem was patched.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the customers with their tickets stuck in &amp;quot;level 3 support&amp;quot; were eventually notified.  I backed out of that project at some point because it just wasn&amp;#x27;t a good use of my time.&lt;p&gt;I understand the need to find a way to scale support.  But if you are going to scale, monitor for effectiveness, plan for procedural changes, and do something to make sure the communications channels are working.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wildrhythms</author><text>I think the unfortunate truth is that &amp;quot;please restart your computer&amp;quot;-level stuff actually &lt;i&gt;does&lt;/i&gt; solve whatever problem the customer is reporting enough that companies put value into that type of support.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re reading HN you probably don&amp;#x27;t need that level of support, but that&amp;#x27;s not to say there aren&amp;#x27;t customers who need their hand held to restart a computer.</text></comment>
<story><title>It&apos;s been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me</title><url>https://dynalist.io/d/wRIiJ0s0ONiB1w98ginB4g_n</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mgkimsal</author><text>&amp;quot;scaling support&amp;quot; almost always seems hand in hand with &amp;quot;dumbing down for lowest common denominator&amp;quot;.  By the time things have made it through &amp;quot;please restart your computer&amp;quot;-level stuff, maybe the only way to scale is to put real engineers on problems and &amp;quot;allow&amp;quot; them to actually talk to the people having the problems.  This approach seems to be the only one companies seem hell-bent on never trying.</text></item><item><author>Steeeve</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s comical.  I feel like I have an understanding of what&amp;#x27;s going on because I&amp;#x27;ve been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google.&lt;p&gt;I was told - &amp;quot;there&amp;#x27;s a backlog of support requests.  They are old requests that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can&amp;#x27;t handle.  Being an expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I said &amp;quot;OK, but let me be very clear that this is secondary to all other work that I&amp;#x27;m doing.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Then they proceeded to hand over tickets.  I wasn&amp;#x27;t allowed to communicate directly to customers, and communicating with their offshore staff was a challenge.  &amp;quot;I need a log to even begin to troubleshoot this.&amp;quot;  followed by a frustrated customer reporting &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t know why you&amp;#x27;re asking for this log, it won&amp;#x27;t help.&amp;quot;  OK, I have to be more clear with support, who I assumed would know.  &amp;quot;I need this log.  You create it by taking these steps.&amp;quot;  Another follow up from the customer with the same log again, reporting more frustration.  Repeat this process 5 or 6 times, on 20 different tickets.  I finally follow up along a different path.  &amp;quot;Well, you see they see a request for logs and they only have one template to ask for logs.  I&amp;#x27;ll get it straightened out.&amp;quot;  A month goes by.  I&amp;#x27;m getting requests for updates.  I follow up on every path I have available.  One customer was smart enough to get me the right logs, but they did not forward that log on.  After much back and forth I ended up getting that one log.  It pointed to a source code problem that I had no access to view, let alone edit.  And of course, I have no contact to send this to.&lt;p&gt;What I ended up doing is submitting a bug report, the proper logs, and a summary of the logic problem in the source through one of my clients support account.  Then I updated the tickets that looked to be related with &amp;quot;pending outcome of support ticket 1234.  Months later, that particular problem was patched.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the customers with their tickets stuck in &amp;quot;level 3 support&amp;quot; were eventually notified.  I backed out of that project at some point because it just wasn&amp;#x27;t a good use of my time.&lt;p&gt;I understand the need to find a way to scale support.  But if you are going to scale, monitor for effectiveness, plan for procedural changes, and do something to make sure the communications channels are working.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flukus</author><text>Because engineers are expensive, engineers that can talk to customers are even more expensive and decent engineers willing to do support are even more expensive.&lt;p&gt;That said, I do think software devs should be more involved with the customer for other reasons, far to often they are building software without having any idea what the customers workflow is.</text></comment>