[matt_heimer]

I think most big tech companies are like this and it's just going to get worse as AI adoption increases internally.

2 days ago I tried to create new gmail account and Google insisted that my phone number was used too many times. Fine, I'll pay for a new workspace account... Submit my billing information, that same that I use on other accounts but now there is an extra validation step that requires my ID and copies of my bank statement. Wasn't happy about that but tried it anyway. They expected my entire checking account number to appear on my bank statement. My bank account number is for my entire account and not just the checking portion but even if they were the same my bank redacts parts of the number so that if anyone gets my statement they can't just start drafting money.

The additional information section where I explain things is obviously ignored because the auto generated responses are sent pretty fast.

I can't decide what the saddest part is, the fact that their "give us a moment" emails that are send immediately after submitting still say they need extra time to process the request due to limited staffing because of covid or the fact that Gemini was brutal in criticizing them when I asked if it was normal to expect complete account numbers on the statement.

Similar to OP, the embedded help chat got in a loop of telling me I needed to speak to a rep to fix the issue and when attempting to connect me it would deny the request because I wasn't a paying customer yet.

[csomar]

The sad part is that you gave your information and kept trying to give them money despite all of this hassle? What is exactly you are looking for? If it's email, there is tons of providers out there who will be happy to take your money.

[matt_heimer]

It was more that for past reasons they already have all my information so I'd rather avoid giving to out to other companies.

And their spam filtering is hard to beat.

Ended up narrowing my alternatives to fastmail and Microsoft. And since one of those already also had my info I went with the existing relationship.

[throwaway290]

As a Russian, maybe they are trying to make sure you're not a Russian.

It used to be that if I pay I am ok, now if I pay you go to jail. so you better make sure i'm not the wrong type of guy to accept money from

[Slothrop99]

And there are many tons more providers who will be happy to take your money while promising to spam google. TFA prob ain't exactly legit, eh?

[bryanrasmussen]

the only thing I can think that would make it imperative that you get a gmail instead of other email provider is that google provides the ecosystem of apps and google apps script to automate them, if you have built up a lot of tooling for automating things it can be a pretty sweet platform to do things in.

[lelanthran]

> I think most big tech companies are like this and it's just going to get worse as AI adoption increases internally.

Welcome to UB, at scale, in every language.

Everyone loves to complain about C (and C++) UB; well, now, you have that in every language.

We're at the point now that my manually written (non-trivial) projects C hits fewer undefined behaviour than even trivial projects constructed with an LLM and human "review".

(I even wrote a blog post about it!)

[ido]

What does UB refer to here?

[TacticalCoder]

> Fine, I'll pay for a new workspace account...

That's bad for you don't have the account yet but at Google, once you're a paying customer --and hence you're not the product anymore--, there are actual people helping you on the phone when you call them. Of course the catch-22 here is that you don't have the Workspace account yet, so you may sorry out of luck.