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Comment by scohesc | Hacker News Reader

It's absolutely fucking mind-boggling how these large, impenetrable silicon valley companies (mainly google here) like to hide behind their "algorithms".

"Oh, sorry your main method of making money was terminated, we won't tell you why or how we came to that conclusion - must have been the algorithm, sorry!"

What's that old saying - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? I'm starting to think that these massive companies aren't stupid and that they're actually designing their algorithms behind this and using it as a scapegoat to push their own agenda.

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I’ve never once had a problem reaching a live human that could solve my problem on the business side working with AWS. As a consumer I’ve never had any issues with Amazon retail.

It's pretty difficult to reach a human if you don't pay a ridiculous extra amount each month for support--and even then, they're rarely able to assist with actual bugs. They just assume everything that's wrong is your mistake, and when they finally come to the conclusion that it's a bug on their end, they give up.

If you call $100 a month minimum or a percentage of your service plan (https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/) “ridiculous”. You can immediately reach a live person via chat or phone.

I use the live business support plan all of the time as an “easy button”. Some of the issues they have helped us out with in the past.

- a cross account CodePipeline using CodeBuild and CloudFormation (you cant do it through the UI)

- configuration issues with lambda, API Gateway, and binary transfers.

- Python/Boto3/DynamoDB and DAX coding issues

- various weird CloudFormation issues.

- Parameter Store/CloudFormation throttling issues (ie use DependsOn to force CF to create Parameter Store resources serially)

From the original comment: "these large, impenetrable silicon valley companies".

Amazon isn't a silicon valley company, perhaps that's why its support isn't as horrible.

I don't disagree with anything you have said. But, if your main method of making money is dependent on some particular entity continuing to do whatever they are currently doing, you have a problem.

I hear that argument a lot from people trying to shift the blame to the victim. But we all depend on some particular entity in one form or another, we all depend on the government upholding the value of money, we depend on the transportation systems not to cease to operate, we do that not because we're sloppy but because there is no other way to do things. Try to run ads on the Internet without dealing with Google.

... the Federal reserve, for instance.

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