Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

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?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+revenue+per+employee



Interesting.

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.


Amazon does work on a really thin profit margin though.


yeah, that line of reasoning totally makes sense. And ~500$ per hour for software ticketing is a reasonable number.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: