Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I want to commend some of the Google Compute Platform employees that commented in this thread.

I was at AWS for 6 years (left 2 years ago... today!), and I've always been a proponent of being more open and communicative with developers, but it rarely happened - I guess that AWS' PR policy and such are a big showstopper for these kind of discussions. Although, some individuals did their best (e.g. Jeff Barr) to try to share as much as possible.

It seems that the Google guys know how to do it.

Keep doing it. It will help your business a lot.




The Google Cloud guys are always all over Hacker News threads whenever it comes up. I wish they had the same exuberance about their support tickets :(


> I wish they had the same exuberance about their support tickets :(

Is there a particular ticket (or tickets) you ran into trouble with? I can try to follow up.


My issue was resolved eventually (took about a month with one week lag in their replies and it was me who figured out what was going on, not the support).

It looks like the App Engine documentation was finally fixed. It used to say "If you do not specify a class, F1 is assigned by default." as recently as a few months ago. For a long time the default was actually F1. Then one day my costs went up unexpectedly. The default instance class had changed without notice (at least none that I ever saw). I didn't know that's what had changed though and I emailed billing support just asking what happened. Canned reply email after canned reply email with requests for tons of information they already have (including information I typed into the original support request form). They also had me take screenshots of my console (can they really not look up my information?). And sending me the canned emails takes a week for some reason.

I should probably point out this was billing support. I'm not sure if that's a different department or what but I'm pretty sure they have no idea what they are doing over there (or, at best, just don't have the time or interest to help smaller paying customers).


Thank you for taking the time to write up the experience. I can think of a few metrics that directly relate to what made it suboptimal. Google is pretty good at improving things when we have metrics we can measure directly.

That said, this falls into that category of things where I can tell you "I'll follow up with the teams involved" but it's unlikely I'll be able to say more than that (unless any result makes it into a public blog post or something).

I will do what I can, though.


AWS employees may not speak out very often, but they hardly need to. AWS is a marketing machine, from Jeff's regular blog posts, to the volume of free information they provide and to the conferences that they are running everywhere. I think Microsoft is starting to catch on with Azure promotions & conferences, but it's like Google didn't even know that the there was a race .... and they left their running gear at home.


For me personally[0], the difference isn't being able to speak in terms of marketing, but in terms of engaging with users who have problems. It may not translate to much in terms of run rate, but I like to think (or at least hope) the presence of GCP staff on HN, Stack Overflow, and in any other community we happen to be part of will in the long run pay off in terms of goodwill.

I am free to comment on posts about GCP here on HN. If there are workarounds, I can post them. If it's a bug I can comment as such and file it internally. I can express opinions as long as they're clearly marked as my own. I didn't have to take any training or end up on a whitelist; Google expressed their faith in my good judgement when they hired me. If nothing else, it was a morale boost to feel trusted to act responsibly.

At the other end of the spectrum, GCP has started building out in terms of large-scale engagement. Cloud has been a big part of Google I/O; now there's GCP NEXT as a Cloud-specific user conference: https://cloudplatformonline.com/NEXT2016.html. Building more in this space seems easier to me than a cultural change which encourages (rather than prohibits) customer and community engagement on the individual level, but perhaps I'm being naïve.

[0]: I currently work at Google on Compute Engine; I formerly worked at Amazon, although not on AWS.


This might be true but I think the issue is that many AWS employees actually want to speak out or respond to issues personally.

I used to work at AWS and the things we could say were very controlled. It could just be my team/managers though.


No, I agree with your last statement - at AWS you always feel the invisible shadow of PR :)


I've made feedback on AWS docs, and every time I get a followup from the person responsible for that documentation (different section each time).


Thx boss!




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

Search: