Exactly! The OP’s surprisal is surprising, given that 95% of all support interactions across the board are exactly like this. In fact, the internal support - i.e. the support for employees is just as bad and nonsensical.

It goes pretty much like this. If your problem needs “reasoning” that entails more than matching a direct solution, you’re getting the default answer that’s the closest match to the solution.

The only difference between live support and support docs is that live support has access to some of your data and controls over some flows (e.g. reset password)

Now the real kick - it’s like this across the board outside of tech. If you go to a hospital with a problem that is not the 95 or 99 or whatever they are “tuned” to deal with, your pretty much fucked, unless you can be resourceful or luck enough to navigate the structure until you find someone that actually knows how to.

Bureaucracies? Same.

It’s effectively the same dumb machinery with dumb human cogs that you’re always dealing with.

I think it’s simply the “limit” of average human intelligence and find it hard to believe AI will end up being dumber than this.

Nexus by Yuval Harari covers bureaucracy in the same vein.

> The OP’s surprisal is surprising, given that 95% of all support interactions across the board are exactly like this

If your point is "it is today's norm, let's accept it and shut up", I feel the opposite. If the "norm" is like that, expressing it aloud is my way of contributing to society.

That is clearly not his point.

Bureaucracy didn’t emerge in the 21th, contrary to lack of customer support for big companies. Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification, the root cause is Monopoly (direct or through organized shareholders across an industry). You don’t need support or good service when customers don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.

They can go elsewhere , but then they would have to pay. And users hate to pay when there is a free offer.

I would even go a step further, and say that bureaucracy, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of a large organization: you need more measures in place to keep track of things when there are too many for people to keep track of in their heads.

The problem arises when the bureaucracy becomes, at least for portions of the organization, the end in itself rather than a means to an end (the end being something like better service, efficiency, and accountability). That's when it starts to contribute to frustrations and bad experiences (and, if allowed to continue in this vein, enshittification).

Yes. In fact I was referring to bureaucracies in general as a state’s “support” organization.

> Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification

Bureaucracy does not cause things to get worse. It's not a bad rash that the system displays when it's about to get worse or the puss discharged when it's irritated.

Bureaucracy is a response to a system that works well. It adds rules and hierarchies and red tape to maintain the system state as it is. It's organizational glue.

Bureaucracy is only a problem when trying to change a system.

Thats last part is either naive or just shilling.

The problems isnt the cogs, its the business owners setting up the incentives. Providing reasoned support is expensive from a time and effort perspective, so they dont invest in it. Service reps are specifically trained and incentivized to just fuzzy match the SOPs

And AI cant reason either, so it wont be able to provide any real reasoned support either. And the pwners dont care because they already provide shit service, people like you will just hype the AI up and then make excuses for it when its just as shit

Shilling what? AI in general? What’s the incentive? Hype is harder to argue. LLMs are defective attempts at AI, but that’s also a huge blind spot— effectively confounding AI and AI progress with a specific instance like LLMs.

Business incentive— if you can make an argument on why would a corporation provide shit support to its own employees you win. Also make an argument on why support is actually good at Amazon and others like them. So I don’t buy your argument on incentives either. Although there are other implications related to incentives and AI in general, but those are off topic.

The part that seems to be missing these days, that was historically present in support orgs, is escalation.

You’re always going to do the bulk of support through L1, and L1 support is going to be limited in terms of training and access.

But! The intended flow is that L1 recognizes when an issue exceeds their ability and escalates it up to L2+. And that’s where your talented (and empowered!) support engineers work.

That escalation just doesn’t seem to happen any more.

My hypothesis is that it’s a consequence of L1 being outsourced, where now they’re heavily incentivized to avoid escalating and impacting their probably-contractual KPIs.

Yet another cost for adding too many parties to something that could be better if it were simpler.

> Yet another cost for adding too many parties to something that could be better if it were simpler.

But its not a cost from the perspective of the companies doj the outsourcing: the incentives are the way they are because the result is intended. Its not a cost of adding an extra party, it is part of the reason the party is added.

I think you’re overestimating intentionality in bad outcomes.

It’s entirely possible for a whole organization to want a good outcome, but construct an org chart where bad outcomes are guaranteed by the misaligned and incomplete incentives for sub-divisions.

E.g. the IT support org that is only measured on total spend and time to ticket closure

> It’s entirely possible for a whole organization to ... construct an org chart

You changed actors mid-sentence. The workers in the organization may want good outcomes but they are near-invariably separate from the people making decisions for the organization.

No, I said it exactly as I meant it.

The organization (including the bulk of employees and executive leadership) may want a good outcome, but sub-divisions’ (aka the org chart) may have have their self-interests set to inevitably produce a bad outcome.

The complete lack of any human customer service that is actually answering is the reason I‘ll never again trust my private eMails to be managed by Google.

https://t3n.de/news/google-e-mails-geld-604458/

Oh man, I’m pulling my hair right now because Google _decided_ consistently that someone else has my password and locked them out. They’re so proud of themselves about it I can imagine. But in reality, I’m trying to login my Gmail account on my second iPhone which is next to my original Android that has this Gmail account installed. When I logged in on the iPhone they showed a code and asked me to pick the same code on the Android, I did follow but they insisted that it wasn’t enough and still locked me out.

It is true that google's (lack of) customer support is awful.

>it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification

However, this isn't quite fair on google - it's not arbitrary "sometimes", it's that accounts get locked if there's been unusual or suspicious activity that may indicate an attempt to compromise the account, such as failed login attempts or logins from a new location. The account is locked from single-factor (password only) authentication for a period of time to prevent compromise (which isn't disclosed but as I understand can vary and is usually a week or two), but will allow login with an MFA challenge.

If the account is locked and there are no MFA methods set up or other means of recovery like backup passwords, how are they meant to verify that it's you recovering the account and not an attacker?

Supposing you did manage to talk to a live google support agent, you'd still have the same problem of not being able to verify ownership of the account.

I think this is quite fair criticism of google. The idea of the account being locked and requiring MFA to verify is something they made up without consulting the user. If they're going to do this "suspicious account" locking, they must make MFA mandatory beforehand. If they haven't got MFA from the user, they must trust the password. If that means my account gets compromised, that's my problem.

Note that there is no question who owns the account. That's what the password is for!

> If they're going to do this "suspicious account" locking, they must make MFA mandatory beforehand.

This should probably be the case - I am not a big fan of passkeys [1] but hopefully this will help make non-SMS, phishing resistant MFA available to the masses.

Still, Google are in a difficult position where on the one hand they have people angry about being locked out, and yet if they didn't they would have people angry about their accounts being compromised.

> If that means my account gets compromised, that's my problem.

It is also the problem of everyone on your contacts list, the operators of other services which use Google OAuth for login, anyone who might recieve spam from your compromised account, and so on.

Reducing harm by temporarily restricting the account when heuristics indicate it may be compromised is not unreasonable IMO.

>Note that there is no question who owns the account. That's what the password is for!

This is unfortunately not as true as we would like it to be.

Have a look at the list of compromised services on Have I Been Pwned [2] - not all of these include passwords, and many that do would be hashed (and hopefully salted) rather than plaintext, but it still happens often enough to be of great concern.

[1] WebAuthN / Passkey technology is fine in the general sense, and I am quite happy to use it with a hardware security key (such a Yubikey or Titan) or emulated in a password manager.

However I think the recent push towards having it tied to a TPM on a device such as a phone is a bit short-sighted, simply because these devices are prone to being lost or damaged. If you set up passkey MFA on the phone and don't enrol a backup method, then lose your phone, you have also lost the account. Probably these services should require 2+ MFA methods configured.

[2] https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites

> The idea of the account being locked and requiring MFA to verify is something they made up without consulting the user.

I'd be surprised if that was true. They don't just consult me about MFA, they downright pester me about it.

Besides if you wait long enough Google unlock the account anyway (if it's due to suspicious logins). I know, because it happened to me. I don't know how long it took, all I know is when I happen to check a few months after I thought I had lost access to the account, I could login again.

Finally, it's not like they have a choice. They have to protect the reputation of their domains and servers. It may seem unfair that you cop it if there are security issues, but you got the account for free and you refused to use the numerous MFA options the provide. If someone nerfarious takes over an accout to distribute spam or malware there is a mess that costs time and money to clean up.

There is a real point to be made about how Google / Microsoft and friends message accounts. But it's hard to sympathise with complaints about free ones. Paid for ones, where they promised a certain level of service and then withdraw service without warning and without the ability to recover your data (as I think happened to to the ICC) is a different matter.

Google wiped all my codes from their authenticator app

It really drove home that trusting my identity and online presence to these entities that do not care or even know how to be responsible about it is a very bad idea.

Always use an open source OTP app for something like that.

Nowhere near paranoid enough.

Always take the "manual" OTP option, take a backup copy of the code you copy and pasted. I use my password manager

Then, always export the contents of you entire password manager database, encrypt it with the same password you use for you password manager with the pdkf2 rounds set to an absurdly high number and place it in a public place on the internet. Lots of places will host it for free.

>even if you don’t have 2FA turned on

Presumably the excuse is that it happens because you don't use 2fa and your ip changed, but I heard 2fa might not save you either.

These businesses are all about scale. Each user makes them a paltry amount of money, but they have an enormous number of users.

A single support incident that reaches a paid worker on their side costs them more than the profit you’ve brought them for the year. It probably costs them more than the profit you’ll bring them for your entire life.

With less scale-y businesses, it’s worth it for them to put some effort into fixing problems, as an investment in your future business. Here, the only reason would be to avoid reputational damage. And who’s going to stop using Google or Microsoft because some guy had trouble getting support?

There’s a story (no doubt apocryphal) about Bill Gates telling people working on Windows that a customer calling their support line cost as much as the profit they made selling that copy of Windows. The point was to make it so Windows users didn’t need to call support by making Windows work better. The modern equivalent of this would be to make sure that users can’t reach expensive support in the first place.

With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.

What would be the opposite?

With enough blindfolds all bugs are unimportant?

If business are all about scale then you are not fixing one user problem but you are fixing the same problem experienced by thousands or millions of user.

There is no excuse for being lazy.

That’s the thing, sometimes a user’s problem requires a fix that’s specific for them. Their account gets into a bad state and needs to be unstuck. There’s no fixing that for millions of users, only fixing it for each user, millions of times.

I feel like once they've gotten everyone on the planet using their services, and then fucked them all over, maybe then there'll be a market un-fucking them over.

The common thread is that all these tech giants concentrate on scaling their ability to deliver the product and generate revenue, making service for exceptional situations a lower priority, with solutions that do not scale.

While you are consuming product and paying, you are basically identical to everyone else doing that (except for your varying personal info). That can be scaled in straightforward ways.

If you have some problem that requires attention to your account, that doesn't scale well. Even if it could, it's not worth it to them; it's off the happy, revenue-generating path.