I am old enough to have lived in soviet times for a short while. One thing I remember from back then - in order to get things done, you had to know someone. Perhaps your aunt's friend worked in the politbureau or your mom's classmate was a friend of the director. Through connections like that you could get what you needed.
It was such a relief when times changed and regardless of who you were, you could start exchanging money for things and services.
This story and many others like it remind me of those times - it's back to who you know to get your account unlocked. I've never gotten a story on the front page of HN and probably have 5 twitter followers. What's my avenue of getting my data back?
This isn't just about DO either. Similar stories about google and other services are many to be found.
I'll toot my own theory and it is that nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role.
They want to automate that all away as much as possible.
The future is everyone who isn't somebody chatting about how they run their application on X... because they're mysteriously banned form Y and Z and the next guy talks about how he was banned on X and is on Z now... simply for that reason.
I would support your theory. Support staff don't scale as well or as fast as the technology they're supporting does.
I have often wondered about that for Google. Sure, they have bucket loads of cash, but could they even feasibly stand up a large enough support staff to handle all their platforms? They have so many services, across dozens of languages, and serve hundreds of millions of customers in different timezones.
Also, why would they want to? They're saving untold amounts of money by pushing the problem onto the consumer, and if it works 99% of the time then it's probably good enough.
One of these days, they'll fuck up big time for many customers and get sued. They'll survive, but it'll cost a lot of money.
Especially for Google (and other life-or-death services for many people), the solution seems kind of simple: charge for support. Google terminated your GMail-Account because you logged in from Turkey? Pay $50 to get somebody to listen to your story and work with you on proving your identity. Would you rather change your email on all your accounts or pay $50?
Paying for the product isn't the issue, the company in the DO debacle was happy to pay - support is the issue. I pay Amazon to send me stuff, but I'd honestly be happy to pay them $5 to have my emails to support read & replied to by a person that doesn't have to rely on a low tier auto translate.
I understand that support is expensive, and especially for ad financed or cheap products, having an agent look into something can quickly cost more than you'll ever make off that customer. If the customer pays for support, support becomes a product and the company doesn't have to treat support as a profit-killer (that is, automate it, make it annoying for the customer so he avoids it, and staff it with the cheapest available labor creating a high fluctuation because of bad working conditions).
Best as I can tell they are a early stage startup surviving off startup credits from DO. Also $5 doesn't go far towards support costs. After a minute or two troubleshooting and they are already losing money.
The problem is if google is shutting down access for you how will you use the support provided by google apps. its a support chat you have to be logged in...
Doesn't have to be $50, but a few might make sense to to keep their support from getting clogged with stuff that could be googled. Some sort of "Rescue Me" emergency flare option.
It's billing for solving problems they have caused.
This is completely not Ok. If the idea is paid support for random problems, that's fine, if it's larger prices so it includes support, that's also fine. But if any company caused me a large damage and decided to ask money so they would reevaluate their actions, I'd go to the police.
>I'll toot my own theory and it is that nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role.
The crazy thing is that it's really not that expensive. AWS, for example, offers 24x7 support w/ <1 hour response time for production issues starting at $100 a month. At worst it's 10% of your bill.
It's very doable, but sadly even skilled management (in my experience) tends to avoid / flee support organizations due to their low prestige / resources pattern that is across a lot of industries.
I fear it is something very doable, but I'm not sure there are many in leadership that can.
Hi treis - All DO customers have always received free, 24x7 Support. Of course, we're working on being as responsive as our customers deserve. A few months ago we also implemented a new paid Premier Support tier which features a live channel with 30-minute response times.
I've heard people observe how many support lines have transformed into these impeccably polite, but completely unempowered people--which is more frustrating than being on hold or getting stuck in an automated menu loop because their protocol deflects any anger away from that person (which isn't fair in any circumstance) and leaves you helpless.
> nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role
It's not about money. I worked at a unicorn that paid very high wages for support staff AND allowed them to work remotely and asynchronously from anywhere in the world. If you lived in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe you'd make more than a local doctor just answering emails.
We still simply couldn't hire enough halfway intelligent people fast enough to keep up with the user growth. For each support person we'd hire, there'd be 10,000 new customers joining the same week. "Automating that all away" was the only tractable way to respond to people at all in a reasonable time frame. Obviously the support quality was awful.
I think it is about money... but also skilled leadership who understand how a good support organization works, how to find people and retain them.
I suspect though that due to the general trend to look at support as a "cost" most skilled leadership has moved on or just settled for poor support practices and etc.
Interestingly in my experience support teams that operate outside the home country of the company OFTEN have massive turnover issues, more than say domestic (wherever domestic is). There's a gap there that just never seems to fill in completely.
There is also something to be said for managing support in the sense that you don't have to talk to every 10,000 customers ;)
Hey terryf - Zach here from DO. If you ever encounter an issue that you don't feel is getting the proper attention feel free to reach out. We constantly engage with developers on social, which is primarily Twitter, and we don't look at follower count to determine who to reply to. If for whatever reason you don't get the help you need, you can always email me directly (first name at).
Yeah, support by social media seems to be trend now; those who are loudest and have the largest online followings get support by shouting at companies on Twitter, everyone else is just basically told to pound sand.
Then again, it's not just support for services. Even abuse reports seem to be taken a lot more seriously it's some online 'influencer' at the receiving end rather than an average Joe.
This isn't a DigitalOcean option (I don't think anyways, I've never seen it), but on AWS/GCloud/Azure you can absolutely exchange money in order to get faster support SLAs, or even AWS solutions experts hanging out in your slack channel.
Of course, people who don't have money are forced to deal with greater hardships, yet that's always been a footnote to "regardless of who you were, you could start exchanging money".
Здравия желаю, тов. коллега! I had the very same thought: how big is Google (or DO or anything else) but still you had to know someone to be just safe from the the very service you use.
Personally, I blame the decoupling of the dollar to the gold standard and the distribution of newly minted dollars from the federal reserve into the well connected via banks and corporations that are controlled by a small social segment that all attend the same schools.
Once money became a thing that doesn't cost anything but the changing of zeros, then growth becomes a question not of how to produce something to get money, and but how to get the both the connection and the pedigree needed to receive cheap dollars.
This has created money silos, where the US aristocracy will take hundreds of billions in loses to capture a market and then extract value in monopolistic ways.
You can see this with google, facebook, amazon, etc.
It wasn't always the best companies that won. It was the best companies that had access to the vast capitals pools created out of thin air and who could promise to operate at the monopolistic scales the monied classes were aiming for from the beginning. That is why Ivy leaguers (whether drop outs or not) were chosen as the princelings. They are people who have a lot committed into the system and wouldn't dare betray it: they can be counted on to take things to their logical extreme.
I think also pertinent is the locking out of the middle and lower clases from growth fases of company creation (incentive angel investors and delaying IPOs + legally enforced discrimination against investors based on social class) - Oh and the pooling of legally stolen funds (pensions) into 'safe' stocks. Not to mention the legalization of bribery which has further accelerated our current state of legislative capture.
>"This has created money silos, where the US aristocracy will take hundreds of billions in loses to capture a market and then extract value in monopolistic ways."
I was curious about the above sentence. Who is the aristocracy in the context of startups? Are you referring to the VCs? If so don't the VCs not care about the "class" of the founders of a startup as long as they think there's money to be made from their company?
You are right, they don't care. If they did, someone would take their place. It's a system, not a conspiracy.
But an Ivy graduated person is a class of person that is highly committed to the system. There's a massive effort a whole family has to make for someone to be there.
If success is based on capturing the most market share the quickest so you can corner the market and extract value via monopolistic methods, then why go with anyone who could be a risk?
Edit: Re who is the aristocracy? There is no exact line. Society works on a gradient of privilege, from those who have access to resources with the least effort, to those who have access to resources with the most effort. This always happens. But I believe it is aggravated when money doesn't cost anything to produce because risk is then more important than reward.
It was such a relief when times changed and regardless of who you were, you could start exchanging money for things and services.
This story and many others like it remind me of those times - it's back to who you know to get your account unlocked. I've never gotten a story on the front page of HN and probably have 5 twitter followers. What's my avenue of getting my data back?
This isn't just about DO either. Similar stories about google and other services are many to be found.