6 ms·

Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years. This was for a question about how billing works. It went like this; 1. Case created

Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years. This was for a question about how billing works. It went like this; 1. Case created. 2. Unassigned for seven days. 3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn't find an answer, he couldn't - which is good, he didn't try to give me the wrong answer - he escalates. That's fine - a lot of questions are simple and even silly, and first line support is there to handle them - but they could have done all this without me, if they'd opened the ticket themselves rather than me having to chase. 4. Eleven days later, comes back with exactly the wrong answer. In the meantime, I had figured out the correct answer, and reply, explaining it to him. 5. Next day, I get a wall of plainly AI generated text telling me my answer is correct. It seems to me a key issue here relating to AI generated text, is a misunderstanding on the part of AWS that I as a consumer will value that answer exactly (or indeed, even remotely) as I would value the answer from a human. I do not. I almost ignore AI generated text, as I think it as unvalidated response.

SilverElfin 4mo ago
[flagged]
- thin_carapace 4mo ago
  westerners are loaded with the context that much work is outsourced to india for profit purposes. is indian a race? if it isnt a race, why are you making this about race?
  - Barbing 4mo ago
    What are the chances of someone winning the “(whatever) is not a race“
    - thin_carapace 4mo ago
      turnabout is fair play
- archturtle 4mo ago
  Just happens that these very-lesser-paid workers are usually Indian, Filipino and Moroccan, I guess. And if a company goes this route, they're most likely significantly cutting costs at the expense of the provided service
  - sscaryterry 4mo ago
    It is nothing other than modern slavery.
    - jtwaleson 4mo ago
      It is _very_ different. In the case of outsourcing, where companies offer decent local wages in developing countries, it can not be compared to slavery which is the perpetual ownership of a person. Now with H1B sponsorship, where I've heard rumors of companies taking away passports of their workers, it is very much evil, but not slavery.
    - le-mark 4mo ago
      As of about 4 years ago software developers in India were making .20 of US counter parts. I was managing a team of 7 and 5 left for higher pay elsewhere. Same has happened in China and other countries. They are not so cheap anymore.
- Max-Ganz-II 4mo ago
  Yes.
- bakugo 4mo ago
  Indeed, why is it relevant? We should ask companies like Amazon, because they're the ones who choose to outsource customer support to India specifically 99% of the time.
- 1123581321 4mo ago
  It’s not their race, it’s that they are completely removed from the business context, given simple resolution scripts and little power to escalate out of their call center. When you hear the accent, you know it’s likely the business has done this, unfortunately. Indian tech support works just fine when it’s more integrated with Indian engineering and product ownership, as support in the US would be with an American company.
  - cthalupa 4mo ago
    To the best of my knowledge, the Indian support teams for AWS have all the same access their US/EU/etc. support teams have when it comes to escalation and communication avenues. Obviously real time communication is harder for them than the US counterparts speaking to teams in Seattle, but the same is true for a team in Ireland or Australia. If you are building a follow-the-sun support organization for a technology company, would you really avoid building a support team in India? Seems like it's the country most likely to have a large enough number of people with the expertise and language skills to staff for the need, even if you were paying them the same as their US counterparts.
    - 1123581321 4mo ago
      That’s my personal preference, to hire great remote employees around the world and treat them as first class as headquarters employees regardless of role. I was just explaining the unfortunate correlation Indian support centers have with the business practice to minimize and alienate support. I’m glad to hear that Indian AWS support is fully integrated.
Silhouette 4mo ago
AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague. Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless - it actively suggested incorrect explanations and resulted in several days of trying to change the wrong things while the problem persisted. For my own businesses we give this issue a heavy weight when choosing which services to use. We have even seriously considered moving existing integrations to different services over this one issue recently. If we're integrating with a service then we want to know there's a real person who can actually help if we have questions or anything goes wrong. Failing to provide that because it's cheaper to push everyone through the AI bot is a statement of intent about how much you value your customers.
- mhitza 4mo ago
  Even more annoying, is when the integrated "chat with AI" boxes don't actually have full knowledge about the website. Tried a couple of different such boxes, and in the end I still had to crawl the website on my own to find the information.
- ryanschaefer 4mo ago
  The problem is using AI to “push” the answer to an asker. Unless the company has hidden docs they use for support (which why would that ever benefit them), I could get just as good of an answer if I point my LLM at your docs (“pull” an answer). In fact, the response might be better because I have context set up to tune it to my understanding. Instead, you (company / support agent) have decided that I should instead have a conversation with an LLM through a worse, more opaque harness to the detriment of all of us.
- lokar 4mo ago
  It would be interesting to hear the other side, the people running support. I wonder what fraction of requests are answered by basic knowledge and stuff clearly in the docs. At some very high fraction I could see a lot of pressure/incentive to optimize for these cases.
nickjj 4mo ago
Don't feel too bad. I've been at places where the AWS annual spend was a real lot of money, let's say way over 100k but not 1 million USD. Support tickets went unanswered for months, assigned account reps left us hanging for months with multiple follow ups, etc.. All tickets opened within the last 6 months got AI generated responses with massive delays that indicate the ticket wasn't read by a human due to how inaccurate the response was based on the questions asked.
- Spooky23 4mo ago
  This where I don’t get the HN flame at Google. I had an obscure KMS issue a few months ago, I reproduced it and opened a ticket. It was a low severity. A guy emailed me back in about 4 hours, acknowledged it and thought I was doing it right. Came back 2-3 days later noting that it was a bug, and would be fixed in a few weeks. As a workaround he updated my script with a less obvious/efficient solution to get me through.
  - philistine 4mo ago
    It can be two things. People’s main complaint about Google’s cloud services is that you are forever at the risk of an automatic and unappealable ban of your whole account. Two things can be true.
pards 4mo ago
We recently had an issue with our production Oracle database. Our in-house DBAs spent hours trying to get the AI support bot to assign a real person to join the incident call. It took more than 2 hours to get an actual person on the call. We literally pay hundreds of thousands a year in Oracle support contracts, and this is what we get? AI bots? Nope. Migrating to Postgres is now a top priority. This "replace people with AI" nonsense has to stop. [0] [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-massive-30000-layoff-as-ai-spending-surges/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-m...

SilverElfin 4mo ago

[flagged]

thin_carapace 4mo ago
westerners are loaded with the context that much work is outsourced to india for profit purposes. is indian a race? if it isnt a race, why are you making this about race?
- Barbing 4mo ago
  What are the chances of someone winning the “(whatever) is not a race“
  - thin_carapace 4mo ago
    turnabout is fair play
archturtle 4mo ago
Just happens that these very-lesser-paid workers are usually Indian, Filipino and Moroccan, I guess. And if a company goes this route, they're most likely significantly cutting costs at the expense of the provided service
- sscaryterry 4mo ago
  It is nothing other than modern slavery.
  - jtwaleson 4mo ago
    It is _very_ different. In the case of outsourcing, where companies offer decent local wages in developing countries, it can not be compared to slavery which is the perpetual ownership of a person. Now with H1B sponsorship, where I've heard rumors of companies taking away passports of their workers, it is very much evil, but not slavery.
  - le-mark 4mo ago
    As of about 4 years ago software developers in India were making .20 of US counter parts. I was managing a team of 7 and 5 left for higher pay elsewhere. Same has happened in China and other countries. They are not so cheap anymore.
Max-Ganz-II 4mo ago
Yes.
bakugo 4mo ago
Indeed, why is it relevant? We should ask companies like Amazon, because they're the ones who choose to outsource customer support to India specifically 99% of the time.
1123581321 4mo ago
It’s not their race, it’s that they are completely removed from the business context, given simple resolution scripts and little power to escalate out of their call center. When you hear the accent, you know it’s likely the business has done this, unfortunately. Indian tech support works just fine when it’s more integrated with Indian engineering and product ownership, as support in the US would be with an American company.
- cthalupa 4mo ago
  To the best of my knowledge, the Indian support teams for AWS have all the same access their US/EU/etc. support teams have when it comes to escalation and communication avenues. Obviously real time communication is harder for them than the US counterparts speaking to teams in Seattle, but the same is true for a team in Ireland or Australia. If you are building a follow-the-sun support organization for a technology company, would you really avoid building a support team in India? Seems like it's the country most likely to have a large enough number of people with the expertise and language skills to staff for the need, even if you were paying them the same as their US counterparts.
  - 1123581321 4mo ago
    That’s my personal preference, to hire great remote employees around the world and treat them as first class as headquarters employees regardless of role. I was just explaining the unfortunate correlation Indian support centers have with the business practice to minimize and alienate support. I’m glad to hear that Indian AWS support is fully integrated.

Silhouette 4mo ago

AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague. Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless - it actively suggested incorrect explanations and resulted in several days of trying to change the wrong things while the problem persisted. For my own businesses we give this issue a heavy weight when choosing which services to use. We have even seriously considered moving existing integrations to different services over this one issue recently. If we're integrating with a service then we want to know there's a real person who can actually help if we have questions or anything goes wrong. Failing to provide that because it's cheaper to push everyone through the AI bot is a statement of intent about how much you value your customers.

mhitza 4mo ago
Even more annoying, is when the integrated "chat with AI" boxes don't actually have full knowledge about the website. Tried a couple of different such boxes, and in the end I still had to crawl the website on my own to find the information.
ryanschaefer 4mo ago
The problem is using AI to “push” the answer to an asker. Unless the company has hidden docs they use for support (which why would that ever benefit them), I could get just as good of an answer if I point my LLM at your docs (“pull” an answer). In fact, the response might be better because I have context set up to tune it to my understanding. Instead, you (company / support agent) have decided that I should instead have a conversation with an LLM through a worse, more opaque harness to the detriment of all of us.
lokar 4mo ago
It would be interesting to hear the other side, the people running support. I wonder what fraction of requests are answered by basic knowledge and stuff clearly in the docs. At some very high fraction I could see a lot of pressure/incentive to optimize for these cases.

nickjj 4mo ago

Don't feel too bad. I've been at places where the AWS annual spend was a real lot of money, let's say way over 100k but not 1 million USD. Support tickets went unanswered for months, assigned account reps left us hanging for months with multiple follow ups, etc.. All tickets opened within the last 6 months got AI generated responses with massive delays that indicate the ticket wasn't read by a human due to how inaccurate the response was based on the questions asked.

Spooky23 4mo ago
This where I don’t get the HN flame at Google. I had an obscure KMS issue a few months ago, I reproduced it and opened a ticket. It was a low severity. A guy emailed me back in about 4 hours, acknowledged it and thought I was doing it right. Came back 2-3 days later noting that it was a bug, and would be fixed in a few weeks. As a workaround he updated my script with a less obvious/efficient solution to get me through.
- philistine 4mo ago
  It can be two things. People’s main complaint about Google’s cloud services is that you are forever at the risk of an automatic and unappealable ban of your whole account. Two things can be true.

pards 4mo ago

We recently had an issue with our production Oracle database. Our in-house DBAs spent hours trying to get the AI support bot to assign a real person to join the incident call. It took more than 2 hours to get an actual person on the call. We literally pay hundreds of thousands a year in Oracle support contracts, and this is what we get? AI bots? Nope. Migrating to Postgres is now a top priority. This "replace people with AI" nonsense has to stop. [0] [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-massive-30000-layoff-as-ai-spending-surges/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-m...