Apart from Matt Cutts responding personally on HN, people trying desperately to sell you Adwords, and press releases; they may as well be a black hole.
I had a recruiter from Google call me, chat for 20 minutes, talk about my resume, then ask for my resume. I told her to bing my name and download the latest copy.
Same here. I told the person to type my name in google, with the word "resume" next to it, and that the first result would be my resume. She was astonished and asked how I could do this. I replied that I followed Google's own s/developer/webmaster/ guidelines. (Try it: google "chris mahan resume", it's still there, three years later, first result.)
I subsequently failed the basic algo questions, though, not having a computer science degree (thankfully--both for not working at Google and not having a computer science degree).
This was my reaction to the article as well. I'm still baffled why they don't take some of those billions and invest in a top notch customer service team. I'm pretty sure it would increase their bottom line about ten fold in less than three years.
Google loves things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale that well I guess.
Alternatively, couldn't they start a pay-per-minute service? I recently had an issue with GMail where I was receiving someone else's mail. After about a week I had enough data to source his phone number and contact him to rectify it. But I never had the chance to report the issue. Wouldn't have minded paying a few dollars to have that one rectified at the source.
Once you've lost someone's good will, it's very difficult to get it back. Google terrible, impersonal customer service is almost calculated to piss people off. Either they've calculated that they'll still make money when everyone hates them, or their business strategy is quite short sighted.
Google has about $1,000,000 of revenue per employee [1].
Assuming their support employees worked a typical number of hours and billed every hour they worked to a customer, to keep the revenue per employee at the same level they'd need to charge $480 to $550 per hour for support. And fixing complex bugs in complex software can take a lot of hours.
How many hours of developer time would you want spent on your issue?
Wonder why Amazon doesn't seem to have those problems. To me, they have just as many, if not more products to support and yet they're still known for their exceptional customer service.
Different types of support and different designs of company.
Call centre workers can process refunds, send out replacement items and do similar routine things - and they're not that well paid. It's unlikely there will be other more profitable ways to deploy them in the company. Programmers who can make code changes to fix faults in production software cost a lot more. And there will be other departments (which make a bigger contribution to the bottom line) trying to attract your most talented people.
By design of company I mean some tech companies only employ a small number of non-programmers, so they can afford to give programmer-level salaries, benefits and working enviroment to all employees. Google could give free food / laundry / busses / nerf guns to all employees and might think the equality is culturally important. Amazon on the other hand has radically different pay/benefits/working enviroments for programmers vs call centre workers vs warehouse workers.
AWS support is pretty terrible, my last ticket didn't get a response from them for 8 days. Though when I complained about it on Twitter they responded a few hours later apologising and offering a refund.
