Comment by AdamHominem
5 years ago
> This event left a lot of scar tissue across all of Technical Infrastructure, and the next few months were not a fun time (e.g. a mandatory training where leadership read out emails from customers telling us how we let them down and lost their trust).
Bullshit.
I'd believe this if it was not completely impossible for 99.999999% of google "customers" to contact anyone at the company. Or for the decade and a half of personal and professional observations of people getting fucked over by google and having absolutely nobody they could contact to try and resolve the situation.
You googlers can't even disdain yourselves to talk to other workers at the company who are in a caste lower than you.
The fundamental problem googlers have is that they all think they're so smart/good at what they do, it just doesn't seem to occur that they could have possibly screwed something up, or something could go wrong or break, or someone might need help in a way your help page authors didn't anticipate...and people might need to get ahold of an actual human to say "shit's broke, yo." Or worse, none of you give a shit. The company certainly doesn't. When you've got near monopoly and have your fingers in every single aspect of the internet, you don't need to care about fucking your customers over.
I cannot legitimately name a single google product that I, or anyone I know, likes or wants to use. We just don't have a choice because of your market dominance.
Hi there. I'm a Googler and I've directly interfaced with a nontrivial number of customers such that I alone have interfaced with more than 0.000001% of the entire world population.
All you need to do is browse any online forum, bug tracker, subreddit dedicated to a consumer-facing Google product to know that Google does not give a rat's ass about customer service. We know the customer is ultimately not the consumer.
Maps, Mail, Drive, Scholar, and Search are all the best or near the best available. That doesn’t mean I like every one of them or I wouldn’t prefer others, but as far as I can tell the competition doesn’t exist that works better.
GCP and Pixel phones are a toss-up between them and competitors.
It isn’t market dominance, nobody has made anything better.
Search is famously kind of bad the last few years, but even Maps isn’t that great.
(Data errors I’ve seen this week: the aerial imagery over Brisbane Australia is from ~2010 but labeled 2021, the coastline near Barentsburg in Svalbard is wrong and doesn’t match any other map.)
I’m not saying any of it is great, just that there aren’t better replacements that make me want to switch.
> You googlers can't even disdain yourselves to talk to other workers at the company who are in a caste lower than you.
We must know different googlers then. It's good to avoid painting a group with the same brush