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"