Out of curiosity, I tried to search for the specific function of Support Engineer both for AWS and Google on several job boards. It is a mostly un-scientific approach of course, but the results are as expected. It doesn't even look like google hires Support Engineers. LOL

They outsource it. I'm on the U.S. East Coast. My last GCP support ticket ended up in Romania.

And nothing against Romanians! I work with a ton of brilliant folks there.

Outsourcing inevitably creates a firewall between engineering and support that shouldn't exist though.

In a properly functioning org, support has a way to escalate quickly to engineering if it's confirmed "This is broken." Engineering in turn uses those incoming requests to recognize flaws in their own products.

Outsourcing creates "Hide behind the SLAs and remain ignorant of any issues you've created" barriers that will ultimately sink a company.

At Basho engineers would often spend time working support to get a better view into customer pain points. Outsourcing support sounds like a giant middle finger to customers.

I'm biased, because I came up through support before I went into engineering.

But to me, the question has always been "Do I think I'm omniscient as an engineer? Do I think I can imagine every way the customer is going to try and use this product? Every way it can interact with other systems? Every quirk of a specific customer environment/dataset/etc.?"

Well, if not, then good news! The support org should be capturing, categorizing, documenting, and forwarding all those cases to me.

And each case is an opportunity to make the product better!

Google is a global company. How do you know they aren't google employees in Romania?

I mean, you can't be 100% sure in any one case but they do have a lot of third-party companies listed for support: https://cloud.google.com/terms/subprocessors

They might be a Google employee, and I have no issues with Romanians, but if they cared about the support experience they should have placed me with a rep that has much better timezone overlap.

From their subprocessors list it looks like it was most likely "WEBHELP ROMANIA SRL"

Will choose AWS just for support anyday over alternatives. I'm not even a paying customer and I had a slight issue regarding multiple emails registered under the same account and such. I was just starting with AWS. The support was really helpful and provided me with information I didn't even know I needed.

Agree. AWS charge a minimum of 3% of your bill towards support. Which is fine, it makes support scaleable and even a profit centre.

What's weird is that GCP charge the same but apparently don't deliver

I can't speak to AWS, but I have worked with Amazon support for seller related questions and it was a noticeably bad experience, to the point of me completely abandoning a strong business I had been pursuing. I had bought commercial insurance to protect something that I was working on. During the filing process to register everything on the books properly with Amazon, the insurance company didn't have some key detail that Amazon required to be listed on the insurance companies paperwork. I brought this up to them and...nothing.

I contacted them 3 or 4 times about it. I received a scripted response and eventually gave up and assumed that, if I couldn't even get the registration paperwork to go through with Amazon without months of delay, that it's probably better to call it off and look elsewhere. I'm glad I did.

This was also through a fairly well known insurance company, and I suspect that a noticeable large chunk of people who sell through Amazon have improperly filled insurance paperwork, even though there were a bunch of warnings about needing to do it in a very specific way.

The stench of indifference on Amazon's end, and the fact that they were entirely willing to leave a lot of money on the table, has left a very bad impression on me. This isn't even to mention the numerous issues in how they treat employees, artificially raise prices, etc.